About OpenSanctions
OpenSanctions helps to keep people and companies accountable for their political and economic actions. We build a database that tracks a wide range of entities in the public interest: sanctioned companies, politicians, fraudsters, and criminals. Originally built to support anti-corruption journalists, OpenSanctions has also become a powerful tool used by hundreds of commercial clients worldwide for know-your-customer screening, legal compliance, and in-depth investigative analysis.
We are a small, bootstrapped, sustainable business. Transparency and accessibility are core to how we work: our pipeline is open source, and public search is free for everyone. We're looking for someone to step into our Customer Success Lead role on a fixed-term basis (approximately May--December 2026) to cover a parental leave, with some overlap on either end for onboarding and handover.
The Role
You'll own the customer relationship from onboarding through ongoing success, making sure our clients get real value from OpenSanctions data and services. This is a hands-on leadership role: part strategy, part execution, and a lot of thoughtful communication with the people who rely on our product every day.
You'll work closely with our Engineering and Customer Engineer teams. A typical week might include onboarding a new client, reviewing retention and satisfaction metrics, running a product feedback session, or coordinating with our product team to ensure customer needs shape what we build next.
What you'll do
- Customer onboarding: Guide new clients through implementation, ensuring a smooth transition and early time-to-value.
- Retention and satisfaction: Develop and run strategies to keep customers happy, engaged, and renewing, monitor success metrics and KPIs, and act on what you find.
- Feedback and insights: Design and execute customer feedback programs that turn real-world usage into concrete product and service improvements.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Work with engineering, product, and support to resolve customer issues and align our roadmap with what customers actually need.
- Customer journey optimization: Identify friction points and lead initiatives to improve the experience across every touchpoint.
- Training and enablement: Facilitate sessions and create resources that help customers get the most out of our product features.
- Growth opportunities: Analyze customer data to spot trends and surface opportunities for upselling or expanding usage.
- Team coordination: Provide guidance and support to the customer success and support team to keep everything running smoothly during the cover period.
About you
Required
- You have meaningful experience in customer success, account management, or a similar client-facing role, ideally in a B2B SaaS or data product context.
- You communicate clearly and warmly with a wide range of stakeholders, from technical users to decision-makers.
- You're comfortable with metrics: tracking KPIs, spotting trends, and turning data into action.
- You can manage end-to-end onboarding processes and understand what "seamless" actually entails.
- You're organized and self-directed. This is a small team, and you'll need to prioritize well without a lot of overhead.
- Fluent to native English (written and spoken), and you can overlap working hours with CET (preferably CET ±3).
Nice to have
- Familiarity with compliance, sanctions, AML/KYC workflows, or investigative research.
- Experience with HubSpot or similar CRM/customer success platforms.
- Comfort working with technical products or alongside engineering teams, even if you're not writing code yourself.
- Previous experience covering or stepping into an established role mid-stream.
Details
- Duration: Approximately May--December 2026 (fixed-term parental cover), with onboarding/handover overlap on both ends. Ideal: possibility to extend (or stay ;)).
- Workload: Full-time preferred; open to discussing 80%+.
- Remote-first with an optional desk in our Berlin office.
- Async culture and flexible hours --- work where and when you're most productive.
- Small, friendly team --- not "hyper-growth" burnout vibes.
- Employment under German law if resident in Germany, freelance contract or EOR elsewhere.
How to apply
Email jobs@opensanctions.org with a short note on why this role fits you, plus your CV. If you have examples of customer programs you've built, onboarding processes you've improved, or retention wins you're proud of, we'd love to hear about them.
We're hoping to fill this role promptly so there's plenty of time for a thorough handover. We look forward to meeting you!
