Alexander Lavoie — Customer Success Manager

Enterprise software professional with 25 years of experience driving and enabling customer success. My first role was Technical Support Engineer at Sun Microsystems and Oracle focused on messaging and identity management applications. This led to being selected as a founding member of the “Premium Plus” team in 2007, which was dedicated to top tier accounts with an emphasis on proactive support and deep relationship building. Funnily enough, it was basically "Customer Success" before that term had been invented. Upon joining Cloudera in 2014, I was one of the original 3 members of the “Proactive Support” team focused on achieving total customer success by leveraging advanced diagnostics, home-grown tooling/alerting, custom processes, and a relentless customer advocacy mindset. Proactive support partnered across all LOBs to ensure the customers' experience was second to none. Project, program, and formal Product ownership followed from 2020 to 2022 when I was the owner of Cloudera’s “Validations” product. Validations was a customer-facing self-service/on-demand utility dedicated to proactive issue resolution. Support case deflection, increased overall cluster health, performance, and security were just some of the major benefits to customers and Cloudera. Meeting with customers and understanding how Validations improved their operations and kept costs in line was one of the best experiences I ever had. In January 2023 I joined the "Majors" team at Starburst responsible for the post-sales success of our most complex and highest ARR financial enterprise customers. "Flying the plane" and building trust and confidence with 3 of the largest financial institutions in the United States was enormously rewarding and I learned skills from some of the best in the business that I still remember and leverage every day with my current customers. Since March 2024 I’ve loved being a CSM at Redpanda Data! Being part of this Customer Success team has been a dream come true. Each day brings new opportunities for learning and growth alongside some of the finest humans I’ve ever known. Helping our customers realize value from the Redpanda platform is something I am proud to do.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Customer Success Manager with extensive experience in SaaS and enterprise software solutions.

Location: St. Petersburg, Florida, United States

Experience: 24 yrs 9 mos

Career Highlights

25 years of experience in enterprise software.
Pioneered proactive support initiatives at Cloudera.
Achieved 198% of FY26 expansion quota at Redpanda Data.

Work Experience

Redpanda Data

Principal Customer Success Manager (2 yrs 2 mos)

Starburst

Strategic Engagement Manager (Majors) (1 yr 2 mos)

Cloudera

Senior Staff, Support Product Manager (2 yrs 10 mos)

Senior Proactive Support Engineer (5 yrs 8 mos)

Oracle

Senior Technical Support Engineer (4 yrs 4 mos)

Sun Microsystems

Technical Support Engineer (8 yrs 7 mos)

Education

BS at Bentley University

at Belmont High School

Alexander Lavoie

Customer Success Manager

St. Petersburg, Florida, United States24 yrs 9 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

25 years of experience in enterprise software.
Pioneered proactive support initiatives at Cloudera.
Achieved 198% of FY26 expansion quota at Redpanda Data.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Customer Success Manager with extensive experience in SaaS and enterprise software solutions.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

LDAPSunIdentity ManagementSolarisWeblogicLinuxOracle Identity ManagerUnixClusterOracleCloud ComputingDNSPerlShell ScriptingMiddleware

About

Experience

24 yrs 9 mos

Total Experience

5 yrs 7 mos

Average Tenure

2 yrs 2 mos

Current Experience

Redpanda data

Principal Customer Success Manager

Mar 2024 – Present · 2 yrs 2 mos · St. Petersburg, FL · Remote

Performance & awards:
Promoted to Principal CSM in February 2026
FY26 Presidents Club Award Winner
198% of FY26 expansion quota
124% of FY26 renewal quota
Led the CSM team 4 consecutive quarters in FY26 in total new ARR and Net Revenue Retention %
4x “CSM of the Quarter” since joining Redpanda in FY25
Responsibilities:
Manage and deliver the highest quality customer experience, production go-live and value driven renewal and expansion across Redpanda's most strategic accounts.
For years, Redpanda has powered the world’s most demanding real-time streaming systems — reliable, fast, and cost-efficient.
Now, with the new Agentic Data Plane, we’re extending that same foundation to the age of AI: unifying streaming and historical data so agents can act on all enterprise data — instantly, securely, and with full governance.

Starburst

Strategic Engagement Manager (Majors)

Jan 2023 – Mar 2024 · 1 yr 2 mos · St. Petersburg, FL · Remote

Performance & awards:
Renewed and expanded 100% of my book of business in FY24 including 2 of the top 5 banks in the US
Force Management sales methodology trained & certified
Responsibilities:
Member of the "Majors" TAM team at Starburst that's responsible for our largest and most complex customers. My book of business consisted of the 2 largest banks in the United States along with another Fortune 100 financial institution.
Chief duties include being the primary post-sales point of contact and ensuring successful onboarding, production adoption and usage of our platform.
An extremely close partnership with Sales and Product/Engineering has been core to the relationship and it's allowed me to build knowledge in some of the most complex and nuanced deployments across our entire customer base. I've also been able to become intimately aware of the security requirements and processes that are of such critical importance to large financial institutions.
Building relationships across multiple business units has been enormously fulfilling and it's incredible to witness the proliferation of Starburst as an integral piece of their data and AI strategy.
Starburst is on a mission to power analytics anywhere. Founded by the creators of open-source Trino, formerly known as PrestoSQL, Starburst unlocks the value of data by making it fast and easy to access anywhere. Starburst is the only commercial open source company that queries data across any database, making it instantly actionable for organizations. With Starburst, teams can lower the total cost of their infrastructure and analytics investments, prevent vendor lock-in, and use the tools that work best for their business. Organizations like Zalando, Slack, Grubhub, Comcast, and FINRA rely on Starburst to execute fast queries across their data lake and even federate queries across different sources.

Cloudera

2 roles

Senior Staff, Support Product Manager

Promoted

Feb 2020 – Dec 2022 · 2 yrs 10 mos

Performance & awards:
> 2,000 support tickets deflected per year by automated predictive tooling (Validations) resulting in 6 figure annual cost savings to the business
Responsible for Cloudera Support's predictive alerting product achieved through advanced diagnostics.

Senior Proactive Support Engineer

Jun 2014 – Feb 2020 · 5 yrs 8 mos

Performance & awards:
2 promotions over 5 years of service
Certifications:
Cloudera Certified Administrator for Apache Hadoop (CCAH) - License # 100-010-289
Cloudera Certified Developer for Apache Hadoop (CCDH) - License # 100-010-289
Responsibilities:
Member of the Proactive Support team focused on technical project management, cross-functional training and mentorship, customer success initiatives, analytics/reporting, and the best practices of customer engagement.

Oracle

Senior Technical Support Engineer

Feb 2010 – Jun 2014 · 4 yrs 4 mos · Belmont, Massachusetts, United States · Remote

Performance & awards:
Nominated for the “Rookie of the year” at Oracle after the Sun acquisition
Certifications:
Oracle Certified Weblogic Server 11g Administrator (2012)
Products:
Oracle Identity Manager (OIM)
Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA)
Oracle Waveset (OW)
Responsibilities:
Support process master and tool trainer
Knowledge base creation and maintenance
Proactive and reactive support
Defect/bug creation and fix/patch delivery
Problem reproduction and testing
Critical escalation management
Familiarity with all key stakeholders and how they interoperate with support including development/engineering, sustaining, sales, account management, professional services/on-site consultants, and product management.

Sun microsystems

Technical Support Engineer

Jul 2001 – Feb 2010 · 8 yrs 7 mos · Burlington, MA · Hybrid

Performance & awards:
Promoted 3x over 8 years of service at Sun Microsystems
Selected as a founding member of the Premium Plus support team - an initiative years before its time akin to modern day Customer Success orgs.
Member of the “BoB" Class of 2001 for new college hires and successfully promoted to TSE upon completion of the 6 month program including all 3 technical certifications
Certifications:
Sun Certified Solaris 8 Systems Administrator (2001)
Sun Certified Solaris 8 Network Administrator (2001)
Sun Certified LDAP Directory Server 5.x Administrator (2005)
Products:
DNS & Sendmail
Sun Directory Server
Sun Messaging Server
Sun Identity Manager
Responsibilities:
Member of the "Premium Plus" support team focused on a proactive software service approach with the goal of eliminating problems from occurring in the first place. This was accomplished by dedicated support engineers who became very familiar with the customers' environments and used data analysis and reporting to predict the future occurrences of known defects, security vulnerabilities, and other common software misconfigurations.