Hugo Martinez Senior Customer Success Engineer
San Francisco, CA (remote) • customer.success.eng@gmail.com • +1 415-2299
Profile Summary
- Senior Customer Success Engineer with 7 years of experience across Mid-Market and Enterprise dev-platform accounts serving platform engineers, DevOps leads, and engineering managers, specializing in technical onboarding, integration unblocking, and adoption.
- Hands-on across core platform (GitLab), primary cloud (AWS), scripting language (Python), integration surface (REST API and webhooks), observability tool (Datadog), account-health platform (Gainsight), and a product cert (GitLab Certified Associate), with strong fundamentals in solid engineering chops, deep customer empathy, and a bias for fixing the root cause.
- Deep expertise in proactive technical advisory, onboarding to first value, integration unblocking, and adoption beyond go-live, using methodologies such as health-score driven account reviews and office-hours and workshop cadence to ship customers who renew because the product is actually working for them.
- Pairs closely with Customer Success Managers, Account Executives, Support, Product, and Engineering inside remote-first squads with quarterly customer onsites, showing up to QBRs, escalation bridges, and roadmap reviews with a pragmatic, fix-the-real-blocker mindset.
- Senior CSE who shares post-sales technical craft and fosters a culture of customers who hit their own success criteria and runbooks the customer can actually run on their own through office hours and clinic sessions, while running CSE office hours and escalation reviews and authoring widely shared adoption playbooks and reference integration patterns.
Tools & Skills
- Languages & Scripting:
- Python, Go, TypeScript, Bash, SQL, YAML, HCL, JSON, regex
- Platform & Product:
- GitLab, GitLab CI, GitLab Runner, Auto DevOps, Container Registry, Code Quality, Secure scanners
- Cloud, Infra & Deployment:
- AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, Terraform, self-managed and SaaS deployments
- Integration & APIs:
- REST API, GraphQL, webhooks, OAuth, SCIM, SAML SSO, OIDC, JWT, Terraform provider, SDKs
- Troubleshooting & Observability:
- Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, Sentry, log analysis, distributed tracing, kubectl, pcap
- Customer Success & Adoption:
- Gainsight, Catalyst, Pendo, Salesforce, QBRs, health scoring, adoption playbooks, expansion plays, churn-save
- Support & Escalation:
- Zendesk, Jira, PagerDuty, Statuspage, P1 and P2 escalation handling, RCA writing, incident comms
- Certifications:
- GitLab Certified Associate, AWS Solutions Architect Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), HashiCorp Terraform Associate
Education
Work Experience
- Carry a book of 28 Mid-Market and Enterprise GitLab accounts as the named technical owner, running each new customer through a 90-day onboarding playbook that covers SSO, runner topology, first pipelines, and the first real production deploy, landing time-to-first-value at 28 days from contract signature.
- Act as the trusted technical advisor across the portfolio through office hours and architecture reviews with the customer's platform engineers, SREs, and DevOps leads, working CI patterns, runner sizing, secret-scanning tuning, and Auto DevOps tradeoffs against their real workloads, and holding technical CSAT at 4.8/5 across the book.
- Unblock customer integrations against the REST API and GitLab CI surface, writing sample Python and Bash against the customer's tooling, reviewing their pipeline YAML and webhook setups, and pushing 37 integrations to working state with a median unblock time of under 36 hours from first ticket.
- Own the gnarly tickets that bounce off the first-line queue, taking P1 and P2 escalations end-to-end (log analysis, distributed traces, repro environments, partnering with Engineering on the root cause), closing 62 escalations across the book and cutting customer-visible MTTR from 38 hours to 9 hours.
- Guide customer architecture across self-managed and SaaS hybrid deployments, running 45 formal architecture reviews on multi-runner CI fleets and HA Postgres, sizing patterns, and upgrade paths, with a written reference architecture handed back to the customer at the end of each review.
- Run proactive account health through Gainsight health scores blended with usage, adoption breadth, and support load telemetry, intervening on 6 at-risk accounts in the past year with adoption clinics and targeted technical work, and saving 5 of them into clean renewals.
- Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives on renewals and expansion, with technical expansion plans anchoring each conversation, supporting $14M of account ARR across the book and closing the year at 132% net renewal and expansion.
- Trained customer admins and platform owners on Jira and Confluence Cloud through workshops and customer runbooks, pairing with internal champions on the customer side, taking 180 admins through hands-on enablement and holding 76% 90-day active-use past initial rollout.
- Closed the field-to-product feedback loop through biweekly product syncs with Product and Engineering, surfacing platform friction, missing-capability asks, and recurring ticket patterns from the support queue, and shaping 18 structured friction patterns that fed 5 roadmap features shipped within the year.
- Owned cross-team escalation management through cross-team incident bridges with Engineering, Cloud Ops, and the customer's on-call, leading 24 critical customer escalations to clean resolution at a median bridge duration of under 4 hours, with public-facing RCAs back to the customer within 48 hours.
- Worked closely with Customer Success, Account Management, Product, Engineering, and Support leadership to coordinate renewal-risk reviews and adoption push standardization, cross-product handoffs, and major-customer steering reviews, authoring 6 CSE playbooks that shaped the team's onboarding standard and mentoring 3 incoming Customer Success Engineers through their first portfolio handovers.