Senior Escalation & Incident Manager

Job description

Docker has been one of the most loved brands in developer tooling, trusted by more than 20 million monthly users and over 20 billion container image pulls. From solo founders to the world's largest companies, developers rely on Docker to build, share, and run their applications across our suite of products including Docker Desktop, Docker Hub, and Docker Scout. We are a globally distributed, remote-first team building the tools that define how software gets built and delivered. As AI agents redefine software development, Docker is at the center of that shift, providing the sandboxed environments, verified images, and secure infrastructure that make autonomous workflows trustworthy by default. Docker supports customers using the largest and most popular container registry service in the world today, Docker Hub. Millions of users - community developers, open source projects and Independent Software Vendors - push and pull Docker container images billions of times through Docker Hub. We are seeking a Senior Escalation & Incident Manager to own the end-to-end experience for our most complex and critical customer issues. In this role, you sit at the junction between customer support, engineering, and product — ensuring that escalated issues and service incidents receive the urgency, consistency, and executive-level communication they demand. You will help build and improve the frameworks and standards that govern how escalations and incidents are handled, and serve as the voice of the customer when critical issues threaten to erode trust or impact retention RESPONSIBILITIES Escalation/Incident Management & Resolution Own the escalation lifecycle from intake to resolution — ensuring cases are triaged accurately, prioritized by business impact, assigned to the right resource, and driven to closure without falling through the cracks. Maintain hands-on involvement in the most critical escalations, providing guidance, coordinating engineering resources, and managing stakeholder communication in real time. Team Mentorship & Development Mentor, grow, and support a global team of Support Leaders and Engineers. Partner to set clear expectations for case quality, handling, and customer communication standards. Coordinate and train cross-functional teams to triage, mitigate, and resolve escalations & incidents quickly. Customer & Executive Communication Serve as a primary point of contact for enterprise customers and internal stakeholders during high-severity escalations and incidents. Craft and deliver clear, confident written and verbal updates. Manage expectations with precision — knowing when to reassure, when to escalate urgency internally, and when to bring in executive sponsorship. Engineering & Product Partnership Build strong working relationships with Engineering and Product to ensure escalated issues and incidents receive timely attention and appropriate prioritization. Advocate for customer-impacting bugs and systemic issues in roadmap and sprint planning conversations. Establish feedback loops that translate escalation patterns into actionable product and reliability improvements. Process Design & Standards Help define and maintain the escalation/incident criteria, process flow, SLA/SLO commitments, and communication protocols that govern how issues/incidents are handled. Ensure playbooks are current, consistently followed, and refined after major incidents or escalations. Partner with Product and Engineering to produce and deliver post-incident root cause analysis documentation. Metrics & Operational Health Own the KPIs that reflect escalation and incident team performance — Report regularly to Support and Engineering leadership with trend analysis and actionable recommendations. Use data to make the case for tooling improvements, staffing adjustments, or process changes. Voice of the Customer Synthesize escalation data and direct customer feedback into structured insights for Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. Identify recurring themes that indicate deeper systemic issues — whether in the product, documentation, onboarding, or support process — and champion resolution at the organizational level. QUALIFICATIONS - 6+ years of experience in escalation & incident management, SRE, or production operations in a cloud/SaaS environment - Proven experience leading high-severity incident response in complex distributed systems - Experience working in 24/7 on-call or escalation environments - Familiarity with compliance or security incident response - Experience building or scaling incident management programs - Strong understanding of: Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Observability tools (logs, metrics, tracing) - Exceptional communication skills with the ability to remain calm under pressure - Experience influencing cross-functional teams without direct authority - Ability to communicate effectively with both technical teams and executive stakeholders - Strong focus on process improvement and operational rigor - Data-driven approach to identifying trends and driving improvements HOW WE WORK - Scope & Complexity: You'll work on projects of moderate scope and complexity with significant impact on your team and related teams - Guidance: You'll receive general instructions on routine work and more detailed guidance on new or complex tasks - Growth: You'll have opportunities to lead projects, mentor teammates, and develop emerging strategic thinking skills - Autonomy: You'll exercise judgment within defined processes while contributing to process improvements WHAT TO EXPECT First 90 Days — Learn, Listen, and Establish Foundations - Shadow live escalations and incidents end-to-end to understand current triage, routing, and resolution workflows - Identify gaps in case prioritization logic, SLA adherence, and handoff quality between support and engineering - Begin taking ownership of critical escalations with guidance, building credibility with engineering and customer stakeholders - Review past high-severity escalation cases to understand how communication was handled, what worked, and where it broke down - Meet with Engineering leads, and Product counterparts to understand existing relationships, pain points, and collaboration norms - Learn how bugs and escalations are currently surfaced into sprint and roadmap planning - Map the current escalation-to-engineering handoff process and identify friction points - Conduct a full audit of existing escalation and incident playbooks, criteria, and SLA/SLO documentation - Note which processes are well-documented vs. ad hoc, and which are followed consistently vs. inconsistently - Identify the two or three most urgent process gaps to address in the next phase - Review recent post-incident RCAs and post-escalation retrospectives for patterns - Begin cataloging recurring escalation themes by product area, customer segment, or issue type First 6 Months & Beyond — Build, Improve, and Lead - Own the full escalation lifecycle with confidence — driving critical cases to resolution with minimal oversight - Reduce re-escalation rates and time-to-resolution through improved triage accuracy and resource coordination - Establish a consistent, reliable escalation experience that enterprise customers and internal stakeholders trust - Become the recognized internal authority for enterprise escalation communication — executive stakeholders know who to call - Develop and standardize communication templates and escalation status update formats used across the team - Establish a regular feedback loop — a recurring forum or structured process — where escalation patterns are reviewed with Product and Engineering - Successfully advocate for customer-impacting issues that result in roadmap or sprint prioritization - Become a trusted partner to engineering leads, not just a support contact — someone brought in early during incidents - Ship a revised, fully documented escalation and incident management framework including criteria, process flows, SLA/SLO definitions, and communication protocols - Ensure all playbooks are current, distributed, and being actively used by the team - Establish a post-incident RCA process that is consistent, timely, and produces actionable outcomes - Own a metrics reporting cadence with Support and Engineering leadership — delivering regular trend analysis, not just status updates - Use data to make and win at least one meaningful case for a tooling, staffing, or process change - Demonstrate measurable improvement in two or more core KPIs from your 90-day baseline - Deliver a structured escalation insights report — shared with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success — that connects escalation patterns to systemic issues and recommendations Docker does not offer visa sponsorship for this role. We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process for jobs in NYC and certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound https://getcovey.com/product/covey-scout-inbound on April 13, 2024. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here https://getcovey.com/nyc-local-law-144. Perks - Freedom & flexibility; fit your work around your life - Designated quarterly Whaleness Days plus end of year Whaleness break - Home office setup; we want you comfortable while you work - 16 weeks of paid Parental leave (after 6 months of employment) - Technology stipend equivalent to $100 USD net/month - PTO plan that encourages you to take time to do the things you enjoy - Training stipend for conferences, courses and classes - Equity; we are a growing start-up and want all employees to have a share in the success of the company - Docker Swag - Medical benefits, retirement and holidays vary by country - Remote-first culture, with offices in Seattle and Paris Docker embraces diversity and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our company will be. #LI-REMOTE