---
title: 'Customer Success Lead at Strella'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/customer-success-lead-strella-new-york-xg34df47m3ke'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Customer Success Lead at Strella

- **Company:** Strella
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/strella/f5514bed-940e-4f43-b28d-534be7870c91

## Job description

## ABOUT STRELLA

Strella is an AI-powered platform revolutionizing qualitative research with real-time, AI-moderated interviews and automated synthesis. We're a fast-growing, venture-backed startup working with leading teams in product, marketing and consumer insights. We're scaling quickly and looking for a driven Customer Success Lead to own and grow our customer relationships as we enter our next stage of growth.

This is an extremely high impact role. You will have the opportunity to build our Customer Success function from the ground up - including owning our customer retention and upsells, nurturing customer relationships, developing playbooks, and more.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own the Customer Relationship

- Serve as the senior point of contact for Strella's key accounts, building trusted, long-term relationships with champions and executive stakeholders.
- Develop and maintain a deep understanding of each customer's research goals, use cases, and success criteria.
- Nurture accounts proactively rather than reactively — regular check-ins, business reviews, and value-recap touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle.

Drive Renewals & Growth

- Own renewal outcomes across the book of business, forecasting risk early and building mitigation plans.
- Identify and execute on upsell and expansion opportunities, partnering with Sales where needed.
- Own retention and net revenue retention targets for your accounts.

Build the Playbook

- Develop repeatable playbooks for onboarding, adoption, QBRs, renewals, and expansion — turning what works into process the whole team can run.
- Establish the metrics and health scores that define what a "healthy" account looks like at each stage and build dashboards to track these continuously.
- Continuously refine playbooks based on what's working (and what isn't) across the book of business.

Lead the Team

- Manage and coach a team of Customer Ops Associates and CSMs, setting clear goals and providing regular feedback.
- Support their day-to-day account work, unblock escalations, and help them grow into more senior CS roles.
- Partner with leadership on team structure, capacity planning, and hiring as the customer base scales.

Partner Cross-Functionally

- Work closely with Sales to ensure a seamless handoff from close to onboarding.
- Share customer insights and product feedback with Product and Engineering to influence the roadmap.
- Partner with Marketing on customer stories, case studies, and reference programs.

## WHO YOU ARE

High Impact Attributes

- People-centric: You’re energized by working with others, and enabling customers to achieve their goals
- Hungry: Strong will to win; track record of exceeding retention and growth goals.
- Builder: You should be comfortable with creating onboarding, QBR, and renewal processes from scratch, rather than waiting for structure to be handed to you.
- Humble: Self-aware, team-first, open to feedback, and authentic in how you show up.
- Smart: Excellent writing and verbal communication, curiosity, and business acumen.
- Growth Mindset: Invests in personal development and takes initiative to upskill yourself and your team.
- Commercially minded: Treats renewals and upsells as an owned outcome, and comfortable making asks directly
- Customer-first mindset: Willing to go above and beyond for the customer

## Experience

- 8-10+ years in customer success, account management, or a related customer-facing role, with prior experience owning renewals and expansion revenue.
- Experience managing or mentoring direct reports, or clear readiness to step into people leadership.
- Thrives in high-pressure or fast-paced environments; early-stage startup experience a plus.
- Has worked with minimal oversight and shown strong ownership.
- Bonus: familiarity with research, insights, or B2B SaaS industries.

## WHY JOIN STRELLA

- Opportunity to help define and scale the customer success function at a fast-growing startup, with a clear path to grow into a broader CS leadership role.
- Work directly with founders and GTM leaders; your impact will be visible and measurable.
- Build the playbooks and team structure from the ground up in a culture of curiosity, speed, and ownership.
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity, benefits, and career growth potential.

If you're ambitious, curious, and ready to help build a category-defining company, we'd love to meet you!

## About Strella

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Strella is an AI-powered customer research platform that automates in-depth interviews and delivers actionable human insights, enabling teams to run 100 customer interviews and get results by the next morning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (with offices in Poland and the United Kingdom)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Lydia Hylton (CEO) and Priya Krishnan (COO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Customer Research, AI-powered SaaS, Market Research Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B – Product teams, UX Researchers, Marketing, Strategy, and Consumer Insights teams at enterprises and fast-growing companies (e.g., Amazon, Chobani, Daily Harvest)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “AI-powered customer research that delivers human insights 10x faster, so teams can make smarter decisions in hours, not weeks.”

## Products & Services
- **Strella Platform (AI-Powered Customer Research)**: An end-to-end SaaS platform that uses AI to moderate in-depth customer interviews, synthesize themes, and generate highlight reels and reports. Supports 46+ languages, offers access to up to 8M global participants via a built-in panel, and includes features like AI-generated discussion guides, real-time probing, and a chat interface to query research results. Covers usability testing, concept testing, exploratory research, customer journey mapping, and market research.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $18M (Seed: $4M from Decibel Partners in Oct 2024; Series A: $14M led by Bessemer Venture Partners in Nov 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Bessemer Venture Partners (lead Series A), Decibel Partners (lead Seed), Future Back Ventures, MVP Ventures; customers include Amazon, Chobani, Daily Harvest
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew 187.5% year-over-year (from ~8 to 23 employees as of May 2026); expanding globally with offices in Poland and UK; featured in VentureBeat; increasing LinkedIn following (+221.5% yearly to ~3,784 followers). The platform delivers a 90% time-saving compared to manual qualitative research and a 70% cost-saving compared to focus groups.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-first moderation**: AI conducts and probes interviews in real-time, removing human bias and enabling massive scalability (100+ interviews overnight) without sacrificing depth.
- **Speed + Quality combination**: Claims to eliminate the trade-off between high-quality customer research and speed, delivering synthesized insights in hours, not weeks.
- **Built-in participant panel**: Access to 8M global participants reduces recruitment friction, supporting both B2B and B2C research.
- **Multilingual capability**: Conducts research in 46+ languages, enabling global market research without translation barriers.
- **Synthesis at every level**: AI automatically analyzes themes across participants, objectives, and segments, and creates video highlight reels – making insights shareable and actionable.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product & Engineering**: Continuing to enhance the AI moderator’s intelligence and depth, expanding the chat-based insights interface, and improving the discussion guide generation.
- **Go-to-Market**: Scaling enterprise sales (adding Strategy & Operations and Account Executive roles) and building brand awareness via customer case studies and industry partnerships.
- **Global Expansion**: Strengthening presence in Europe (Poland, UK) while remaining headquartered in NYC.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early-stage startup environment (23 people) with founders actively involved. Described as a fast-paced, high-impact place where employees shape the product and culture. Talent sourced from companies like Bain & Company, Microsoft, and Shell.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Hybrid model – expected to work on-site in either San Francisco (Engineering) or New York City (Marketing, GTM). Roles are posted as “Hybrid” (SF or NYC) or “On-site (SF or NYC).”
- **Notable Perks/Engineering Culture**: Small engineering team (7 technical staff) with high ownership and direct impact on the core AI product. Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI/LLM applications for interview moderation and synthesis. Fast-growing company with strong investor backing and customer traction.

## Sources
1. [strella.io](https://www.strella.io/)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/strella-io)
3. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/strella/__ld-clNuRbgOxWy2zCq2jX1N6BrTBniup5Qsq5ReiwkM)
4. [builtinnyc.com](https://www.builtinnyc.com/company/strella)
5. [strella.io/careers](https://www.strella.io/careers)
6. VentureBeat article (October 16, 2025) – cited in Tracxn profile

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