Senior Incident and Escalations Manager

About the role

The Incident and Escalation Management team (IEM) sits within Datadog's Global Support Engineering organization and aims to improve the customer experience during incidents and critical moments. As an individual contributor, you will own the response to complex, high-impact incidents and escalations, handle customer communication and technical engagement, and help shape the incident and case management tools you use.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end response to the most complex and high-impact incidents and escalations, setting strategy, coordinating cross-functionally and keeping clear ownership.
• Navigate competing priorities across multiple critical customer situations, assessing business and technical impact and choosing the right response and escalation strategy.
• Represent IEM to regional Support, Sales and Engineering leadership, and lead communications during sensitive, public or large-scale incidents.
• Act as a trusted partner across Support, Engineering, Product and other teams, influencing decisions when ownership or the path to resolution is unclear.
• Lead cross-functional projects that improve incident and escalation management at scale, and establish best practices, documentation, runbooks and training.
• Mentor other IEMs or GSE members, contribute to interviewing and hiring, and design proactive monitoring and detection strategies.
• Identify systemic patterns across incidents and escalations and influence Engineering and Product to fix root causes.

Required profile

• 8+ years of related experience, including at least 4 years in incident management and customer escalations, owning major incidents in SaaS, cloud, observability or similar complex environments.
• Hands-on technical role at a software or cloud company, such as Support Engineering, SRE or Solutions Architecture.
• Experience as the sole or most senior incident responder in a region or timezone, making consequential decisions without an in-hours escalation path.
• Proven track record of driving complex cross-functional projects and turning incident patterns into operational improvements.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science/Technology, Engineering or equivalent practical experience.

Required skills

• Strong understanding of cloud computing, distributed systems and modern software architectures.
• Scripting in Python, JavaScript or shell is a plus.
• Exceptional written and verbal English, able to communicate with technical teams, customers and senior stakeholders under pressure.

What we offer

• US-based benefits package.
• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan.
• Product training, onboarding and internal mentor and buddy programs.
• Hybrid workplace.