Head of Deployments
Required skills
- B2B SaaS
- customer success
- account management
- technical account management
- retention
- expansion
- team management
- playbooks
- health metrics
- operating cadences
Nice to have
- voice AI
- conversational AI
- customer-facing AI agents
- contact center
- healthcare
- fintech
Role summary
Coval is seeking a Head of Deployments to build and lead a team responsible for customer success post-signature. This role involves setting the strategy and vision for customer onboarding, production monitoring, and expansion, while managing Forward Deployed Engineers and Deployment Strategists. The ideal candidate will possess strong technical and commercial acumen, with a proven track record in B2B SaaS customer success, account management, or technical account management. Responsibilities include owning customer retention, expansion, and overall commercial outcomes, building and leading a high-performing team, and providing critical feedback to the product and engineering organizations. This is a key leadership role in an early-stage startup environment.
Coval is the evaluation platform for enterprise voice AI, built by former Waymo engineers applying autonomous vehicle testing standards to help companies deploy and scale conversational agents to 10s of millions of calls a month. The platform gives engineering, product, QA, and operations teams the infrastructure to stress-test agents across millions of realistic scenarios before launch, monitor every live conversation in production, and continuously sharpen performance through human-in-the-loop review. Trusted by more than 80 customers like Chime and Zoom, Coval is the operations layer for voice interfaces, the next platform after mobile and web.
## **The role**
We're looking for a Head of Deployments to build and lead the team that owns every account after signature. You'll set the strategy and vision for how Coval takes customers from contract to production to expansion, and you'll manage the Forward Deployed Engineers and Deployment Strategists who execute it. You'll be technical enough to know what's happening (and not happening) inside a deployment, and commercial enough to turn it into retention, expansion, and the ROI story behind it. This role rewards people who can sit inside real complexity, find the two things that actually matter, and build a team and a repeatable playbook around them, while working with product and engineering to turn what the field is seeing into the roadmap.
## **What you'll do**
**Set the strategy and vision for Deployments**
* Define what a great deployment looks like at Coval: the motion from kickoff to first eval run to production monitoring to expansion, and the metrics that tell us it's working.
* Turn what started as one-off saves into a repeatable playbook: onboarding standards, account planning, health scoring, QBR and expansion cadences.
* Decide how the team is structured and scaled as we grow, including the mix of FDEs and Deployment Strategists, and how Deployments partners with Sales, Product, and Engineering.
**Own the commercial outcome of the customer base**
* Own adoption, gross and net retention, and expansion across the portfolio, with a forecast you can defend.
* Partner with Sales on the handoff so deals arrive with clear success criteria, scoped use cases, and an identified decision owner.
* Directly own our key large accounts: the day-to-day relationship, adoption, renewal, and expansion, including scope and pricing conversations.
**Build and lead the team**
* Hire, onboard, coach, and manage FDEs and Deployment Strategists.
* Set clear goals, give direct feedback, and grow people into bigger scope.
* Stay close to the work. You'll personally own our key large accounts day to day and step into the hardest stakeholder situations, while your team covers the rest of the portfolio.
**Stay technically credible**
* Go deep enough to diagnose what's happening in a customer's deployment and to pressure-test your team's approach: personas, test cases, metrics, and evaluation frameworks for a customer's voice or chat agent.
* Know which problems make a good first deployment: a pressing deadline, narrow enough scope to isolate what's being tested, and a decision owner who will act on the result.
**Feed the product organization**
* Build a structured feedback loop from the field to Product and Engineering. Every account teaches us something that applies to the next one. Write it down, flag the pattern, and bring the evidence to roadmap planning.
* Know whether a gap is worth building, and work directly with the team that builds it.
## **What you'll need**
* 8+ years in B2B SaaS across customer success, account management, or technical account management, with a track record of owning retention and expansion outcomes.
* 2+ years managing a team, ideally including technical and commercial roles, and you've hired and developed strong people.
* Experience building or scaling a customer success, deployment, or post-sale function. You've created playbooks, health metrics, and operating cadences, not just run someone else's.
* Technical credibility with a technical product (APIs, developer tools, AI/ML or infrastructure software). You're credible with a customer's engineers and with their executives.
* You can hold a room of stakeholders with different incentives, a champion, a skeptic, a validator, and get them aligned on what evidence would change their mind.
* Product instincts: you can tell the difference between a one-off customer ask and a gap worth closing, and you can make that case to the product team.
* You're honest about tradeoffs out loud, including when you're wrong.
* Comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage company where the role isn't fully defined yet, because part of the job is defining it.
## **Nice to have**
* Experience with voice AI, conversational AI, or customer-facing AI agents.
* Experience in our core verticals: contact center, healthcare, fintech, insurance, or logistics.
* Experience in testing, QA, observability, or evaluation tooling.
* Experience working at an early-stage startup, ideally as one of the first leaders of a customer-facing function.
## **Compensation & details**
* Salary: $180k - $250k + commission, equity
* Location: San Francisco office, 5 days a week
* Travel: expect onsite work with customers
## **Benefits**
* Healthcare, Dental, & Vision coverage
* 401K
* Pet friendly-office
* Free gym membership
* Free lunch and dinner when working in the office
* Unlimited PTO
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