Nexus
Head of Customer Success
School Districts
Onboarding
Training
Edtech.com's Summary
Nexus is hiring a Head of Customer Success to lead and grow their customer success function for K-12 school districts. The role involves hands-on account management, onboarding, training, adoption, renewal, and expansion, while also building the customer success organization, defining engagement models, and collaborating closely with sales and product teams.
Highlights
- Manage full-cycle customer success for K-12 district partners, including onboarding, training, adoption, renewal, and expansion.
- Develop district-specific adoption strategies to increase multi-stakeholder usage across leadership and data teams.
- Deliver onsite and virtual training tailored to district size, role, and data maturity.
- Collaborate closely with district data strategy and sales teams for account planning and feedback loops.
- Build CS infrastructure including engagement playbooks, health scoring, onboarding guides, and adoption benchmarks.
- Hire and manage other Customer Success Managers as the function scales.
- Advocate internally to surface product needs and integration priorities from districts.
- Minimum 6 years in customer success with complex SaaS, including 2 years in leadership or player-coach roles.
- Experience designing and scaling repeatable customer engagement models.
- Strong skills influencing senior stakeholders and fluency with AI, data integration, and data-driven decision-making.
Head of Customer Success Full Description
About Nexus
Nexus is an AI-powered decision intelligence platform purpose-built for K-12. School districts run on dozens of disconnected systems — SIS, assessments, finance, HR, transportation, facilities — and the people making the biggest decisions have the least access to the data behind them.
Nexus sits on top of all of it. A proprietary semantic layer connects and normalizes data across every system a district operates, and the decision engine built on top of that infrastructure figures out what matters and surfaces it before anyone has to ask. The result is something closer to a full-time data analyst and strategic advisor than a reporting tool, available on demand across every department in the district.
We're growing fast, adding districts across multiple states, and building toward a platform that learns from every engagement, tracks the outcomes of every decision, and compounds institutional knowledge across leadership transitions. The team we're building now is what gets us there.
Before you read any further
This is a building role at a company in the middle of a breakout moment. You'll start hands-on-keys — running accounts, leading trainings, driving adoption in districts — and grow into the person who owns the entire CS function. If you've led a CS team before, left to find something earlier-stage, and want to build the department the right way this time, this is that opportunity.
If you're looking for a role where someone else sets the strategy and you execute it, this isn't it. If you want to be the one who writes the playbook, hires the team, and owns the number — keep reading.
The Role
We're hiring a Head of Customer Success who can do the work and build the machine.
Day one, you're an IC. You'll carry a book of district accounts, own onboarding through renewal and expansion, and do the hard, unglamorous work of driving adoption inside organizations that weren't built to move fast. You'll train cabinet members, coach data coordinators, and convince a principal that the dashboard gathering dust is worth ten minutes every Monday morning.
But we're not hiring you to stay there. Within your first year, you'll begin shaping the CS org: defining the engagement model, building the adoption framework, establishing health scoring and renewal processes, and eventually hiring more CSMs. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our district strategy and data team on account planning and implementation sequencing, and you'll partner tightly with sales to ensure clean handoffs, realistic scoping, and expansion pipeline that originates from customer outcomes — not cold outreach.
This is a player-coach trajectory with a clear path to Director of Customer Success as we scale. The right person has done this before and knows what good looks like — but is hungry enough to do the ground-level work again because they believe in what we're building.
This role is based in Knoxville, TN. You'll be in the office with the rest of the leadership team, and on the road visiting districts often. We're building something that requires proximity — to each other and to our customers.
What you'll own
- Full-cycle customer success across a book of K-12 district partners — onboarding, training, adoption, renewal, and expansion
- District-specific adoption strategies that move accounts from single-user dependency to multi-stakeholder, workflow-embedded usage across cabinet, campus leadership, and data teams
- Onsite and virtual training — tailored by district size, role, and data maturity — with the presence and credibility to hold a room of superintendents or a table of data coordinators
- Cross-functional partnership with our district data strategy and sales teams: tight feedback loops on account health, implementation capacity, expansion timing, and competitive dynamics
- CS infrastructure: engagement playbooks, health scoring, QBR cadence, onboarding guides, training assets, and adoption benchmarks — most of which don't exist yet and need someone who's built them before
- Partnerhip and eventually management of other CSMs, with a mandate to grow the CS function as the customer base scales
- Internal advocacy for your districts — an intense and urgent desire to surface product needs, integration priorities, and real-world friction to our product and engineering teams
What we're looking for
- 6+ years in customer success with a complex SaaS product — the kind that requires genuine behavior change, not password resets. At least 2 of those years in a leadership or player-coach capacity.
- You've built or significantly scaled a CS function before. You know what a repeatable engagement model looks like, you've designed one, and you know where most companies get it wrong.
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders who didn't choose the product and aren't sure they need it. You earn trust through competence and consistency, not charm.
- Comfortable presenting to superintendents and CFOs in the morning, then sitting with a data coordinator debugging a report in the afternoon. Range matters here.
- Deep fluency with AI and data. You use AI tools in your own workflow. You understand how data integration works at a conceptual level (SIS, assessment platforms, finance systems, APIs, SFTPs). You can speak credibly about data-driven decision-making without sounding like a slide deck.
- Genuinely self-directed. You don't wait for a roadmap — you build one. You don't need permission to send an email, schedule a visit, or make a call on an account.
- Strong operator in writing, on calls, and live in a room. You can adapt a training on the fly when the audience shifts.
- Based in or willing to relocate to Knoxville, TN with district travel weekly.
Preferred
- Prior experience working in or with K-12 school districts
- Familiarity with state accountability systems (TEA, ACAP, etc.)
- Experience with EdTech SaaS
- Background managing a small CS team (2–5 people) inside a high-growth company
