The posting
About the Role
Japan is one of Abnormal AI's fastest-growing new markets, and this is the first dedicated post-sales hire in the region. You will own the full post-sales lifecycle for every Abnormal customer in Japan - from technical implementation through adoption, value realization, and renewal - across all customer segments.
This is deliberately a dual-scope role, between Implementations (Professional Services) and Customer Success. You will personally lead the technical deployment of the Abnormal platform into new Japanese customers, and you will personally own the ongoing relationship, health, and outcomes of those same accounts, with support from Sales, Technical Support, and R&D.
This role is designed to grow. As the Japanese customer base scales, the expectation is that you help shape how Abnormal staffs and supports the region, including specializing this role and regional playbooks.
Who You Are
- Fully fluent in Japanese and professionally proficient in English - able to run a technical implementation and an executive business review in Japanese, and to represent the Japanese customer base credibly to global Product, Engineering, and Support teams in English.
- Comfortable in a hands-on technical deployment and in a strategic conversation with a CISO. You are energized by owning both, and you are not looking for a role that is purely one or the other.
- Comfortable being the first and, for now, only person doing this in a market.
- Action-oriented, analytical, and collaborative in your approach to implementation, customer success, and issue resolution.
- Skilled at building trust and maintaining relationships with stakeholders at all levels of an organization, including executives, with an understanding of how business relationships and decision-making work in Japanese enterprises.
- Technically credible on email security fundamentals, enterprise mail flow, and SaaS integration patterns. Able to earn the confidence of a customer's mail administrators and security team.
- Dedicated to delivering measurable customer value, with a strong prioritization instinct and the discipline to manage a mixed portfolio of live deployments and ongoing accounts at the same time.
- A roll-up-your-sleeves operator who uses AI and templating to make the repeatable work fast, so your judgment goes where it actually matters.
What You Will Do
The balance will shift toward implementation during periods of heavy new-logo activity and toward customer management as the installed base matures. Expectations is 60-70% implementation and 30-40% customer management to start.
Implementation and Deployment
- Own the post-sales technical deployment of Abnormal products for Japanese customers, managing a portfolio of concurrent implementation projects from post-sales handoff through go-live and hypercare.
- Lead an effective handoff from the pre-sales team, capturing POV success criteria, the customer's tech stack, security roadmap, timelines, compelling events, and key points of contact before kickoff.
- Run problem discovery to understand each customer's goals and success criteria, and build a delivery plan aligned to them.
- Develop and execute project plans, managing scope, schedule, and quality, and produce clear status reporting to both the customer's project team and internal stakeholders in Japanese and English.
- Deliver product training, portal walkthroughs, and enablement in Japanese so that customer teams are self-sufficient at go-live.
- Consult on best practices, configuration, and creative solutions to produce implementations that are impactful and scalable, including mail routing, filtering, and SEG-related work.
- Identify and proactively mitigate implementation risk, remove roadblocks, and pull in the right internal escalation resources.
- Guide customers to full value across the Abnormal platform, including Inbound Email Security, Account Takeover Protection, AI Security Mailbox, Email Productivity, AI Phishing Coach, and Posture Management, on both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
- Maintain accurate project records and status in associated delivery tooling.
Customer Success
- Act as the primary point of contact for customers across every segment, developing strategic relationships and owning adoption and success planning.
- Deliver business reviews at the cadence appropriate to each account's segment, communicating ROI aligning with the customer on success metrics that support retention and expansion.
- Understand each customer's industry, goals, and challenges well enough to make tailored recommendations, and align internal and external stakeholders on success objectives.
- Drive awareness and usage of key platform capabilities, provide ongoing education, and identify opportunities for expanded adoption and commercial growth.
- Proactively monitor customer health, manage escalations, and work with the broader CS team, Product, Engineering, Support, and Sales to resolve issues and share actionable insight from the region.
- Partner with the Sales, Renewals and leadership on retention and expansion outcomes for the region.
- Maintain expert knowledge of the product roadmap and communicate relevant updates and enhancements to Japanese customers.
- Develop and execute customer success plans that address risk before it affects satisfaction or renewal.
Building the Region
- Contribute to and maintain Japanese-language customer-facing materials, playbooks, and enablement content, working with the global teams that own the source content.
- Serve as the internal advocate for Japanese market requirements, including product localization gaps, Japanese-language support needs, and region-specific detection and compliance considerations.
- Act as a connective point between Japanese customers and global Product and Engineering, translating regional feedback into prioritized, well-evidenced input.
- Flex to support the broader APAC customer base where useful, and contribute to defining how Abnormal staffs the region as it grows.
Must Haves
- Native or fully fluent Japanese, and professional written and verbal English.
- Based in Japan, with the right to work in Japan.
- 5+ years in a customer-facing role at an enterprise SaaS company, with meaningful experience on both sides of post-sales implementation or professional services delivery, and ongoing customer management, success, or technical account management.
- Demonstrated experience delivering enterprise-grade cybersecurity or security-adjacent SaaS implementations, including projects involving the integration or migration of enterprise mail flow systems.
- Track record of running projects end to end with strong prioritization and time management, coordinating across functions to hit objectives, and proactively identifying and mitigating project risk.
- Proven ability to build and sustain long-term customer relationships, including at the executive level, and to manage a portfolio of accounts.
- Well versed in email security fundamentals, including SPF, DKIM, DMARC, SMTP, MX records, mail routing, and commercial filtering and SEG solutions.
- Strong grounding in networking fundamentals and SaaS integration patterns, with hands-on experience across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments to support the seamless replacement of SEG functionality.
- Strong problem-solving skills and experience resolving escalations while protecting the customer relationship.
- Excellent communication, presentation, and organizational skills, able to move between strategic and technical conversations.
- Proficiency with CRM and case management tooling such as Salesforce and Jira.
- Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to Haves
- Experience as the first or founding post-sales hire in a new market, or experience standing up a regional practice.
- Experience with Gainsight or comparable customer success platforms.
- Log data analysis experience with a SIEM or similar tool.
- API or integration experience; Python or Java familiarity.
- Experience selling or delivering into Japanese enterprises through a channel or distribution partner model.
- Additional APAC language capability.
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A note on AI in our process: Abnormal AI uses AI-assisted tools to help our recruiting team prepare for candidate interviews. These tools analyze resume content and role requirements to suggest interview questions and areas for the interviewer to explore.They do not make hiring decisions or screen candidates automatically. Every decision about a candidacy is made by a person. Further, if your application is successful and Abnormal AI makes a conditional offer of employment, we will carry out pre-employment checks which must be successfully completed to progress to a final offer. All processes and pre-employment checks are in line with prevailing legislation and Abnormal AI's policies relevant to our security and privacy standards.
Abnormal AI is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law. For our EEO policy statement please click here. If you would like more information on your EEO rights under the law, please click here.
