Escalation and Incident Response Manager

We are seeking a visionary and proactive Escalation Manager to lead our Software Engineering team's efforts in managing and resolving major incidents and customer escalations as well as leading post-mortem reviews to drive continuous improvement.  The ideal candidate will drive continuous improvement initiatives, foster a culture of excellence, and ensure minimal disruption to our services. This role requires exceptional leadership, strategic thinking, and the ability to inspire and guide teams under pressure. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Incident Response & Management (I think this should be the first responsibility – leading incidents)
• Act as the primary point of contact for major incidents, ensuring timely detection, assessment, and resolution.
• Lead incident response calls with engineering, support, and infrastructure teams to coordinate triage, mitigation, and recovery efforts.
• Communicate impact and status updates to key stakeholders, including engineering leadership, customer success, and executive teams.
• Escalate incidents appropriately to technical experts, senior leadership, and external partners when required.
• Ensure adherence to the Incident Management process, from detection to resolution and documentation.

Leadership and Strategy:

• Lead the incident and escalation management function with a focus on strategic outcomes and continuous improvement.
• Develop and implement a comprehensive incident management strategy that aligns with organizational goals.
• Mentor and coach team members, fostering a culture of accountability and excellence.
• Act as a role model for effective communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Continuous Improvement:

• Analyze incident and escalation data to identify trends and areas for improvement.
• Drive the implementation of best practices and innovative solutions to enhance incident and escalation processes.
• Lead post-incident reviews to identify root causes and ensure preventive measures are in place.
• Promote a culture of continuous learning and improvement within the team.
• Proactively monitor and follow up on outstanding escalated issues to ensure timely resolution.
• Create and review documentation for incident and escalation training.
• Define and track incident KPIs (MTTR, MTBF, Incident Volume, Severity Trends, etc.) to measure operational performance.
• Conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and post-mortem meetings to identify preventative measures and track action items.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Serve as the primary point of contact for escalations, ensuring timely and effective resolution, corrective action tracking, and follow through
• Build and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Communicate incident status, resolution plans, and improvement initiatives to senior leadership.
• Advocate for the needs and concerns of stakeholders in incident and escalation processes.

Collaboration and Communication:

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless incident resolution and knowledge sharing.
• Facilitate regular incident management meetings and workshops to drive continuous improvement.
• Prepare and present detailed incident and escalation reports to leadership, highlighting key insights and recommendations.
• Advocate for customer needs across departments, ensuring their voice is heard.
• Work with SRE, DevOps, and Engineering teams to improve system resiliency, failover strategies, and reliability engineering.
• Work closely with Customer Success & Support teams to ensure incident updates and resolutions are communicated effectively.
• Provide regular incident reports to executives and key stakeholders.

Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, Operations, or a related field.
• Proven experience in incident and escalation management with a focus on leadership and continuous improvement.
• Experience in quality management / continuous improvement frameworks such as 6-Sigma, Kaizen, TQM. 
• Experience in ITSM / ITIL frameworks
• Strong analytical and strategic thinking skills.
• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills.
• Experience leading Customers through difficult situations and rebuilding trust
• Ability to inspire and lead teams under pressure.
• Familiarity with incident management tools and software such as Jira Service Management, OpsGenie, ServiceNow, etc.
• ITIL certification is a plus.