R&D Escalation Manager
- Own escalation outcomes end to end - proactively drive every escalated ticket to closure with the owning team (chase R&D, unblock stalls, guarantee SLA coverage), with no orphan issues.
- Own the definitions, not just the tracking - define and periodically re-baseline escalation SLAs, severity criteria, and quality standards, and decide them independently rather than escalating the decision upward.
- Lead ad-hoc task forces for critical and urgent production incidents, and ensure every severe incident produces a real post-mortem with action items that are tracked and actually closed.
- Own escalation metrics and dashboards, enforce data quality, and use the escalation vantage point to spot recurring patterns and drive systemic fixes with R&D - not per-ticket firefighting.
- Scale the escalation function without scaling headcount by making AI and automation the default: AI-assisted triage and routing, AIOps and auto-remediation to bring MTTR down, and continuous elimination of repetitive toil.
- Experience in software development and/or technical support, with genuine ownership of escalation and incident management.
- Demonstrated ability to lead investigations and full root-cause analysis, owning them through to the end.
- Bias to independent decision-making - comfortable setting priorities, SLAs, and quality bars without waiting to be handed the answer.
- System-level thinking - turns individual incidents into process and product improvements.
- Assertive and driven, comfortable pushing senior developers and managers when tickets stall; proven record leading cross-functional / matrix-managed teams (no direct reports).
It would be great if you also have:
- Hands-on experience with incident response and troubleshooting in production, ideally in networking / cloud infrastructure environments.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring tooling (Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty).
- Comfort using automation and AI tooling to streamline operational work - scripting, agents, AIOps / LLM-based automation.
- Understanding of SASE / VPN / network fundamentals.
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