Senior Incident and Escalations Manager

The role

You will lead the response to complex, high-impact incidents and escalations. You will manage customer communications, implement processes and automations, and drive cross-functional coordination to improve the customer experience.

What you will do

• Lead response to complex, ambiguous, and high-impact incidents and escalations.
• Set response strategy and drive cross-functional coordination.
• Navigate competing priorities across multiple critical customer situations.
• Represent IEM to regional Support, Sales, and Engineering leadership.
• Lead communications during sensitive, public, or large-scale incidents.
• Act as a partner across Support, Engineering, and Product teams.
• Lead high-impact, cross-functional projects to improve incident management.
• Establish and evolve incident and escalation best practices, documentation, and training.
• Mentor and develop other IEMs or GSE members.
• Design proactive monitoring and detection strategies.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of related professional experience.
• At least 4 years of experience in incident management and customer escalations.
• Demonstrable ownership of major, high-impact incidents and business-critical customer escalations in SaaS, cloud, observability, or similarly complex software environments.
• Significant experience in a hands-on technical role at a software or cloud company, such as Support Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or a similar technical function.
• Strong understanding of cloud computing, distributed systems, and modern software architectures.
• Ability to lead through ambiguity during high-pressure, high-visibility situations.
• Experience operating as the sole or most senior incident responder in a region or timezone.
• Experience identifying systemic patterns across incidents or escalations and translating them into operational, process, or technical improvements.
• Proven experience driving complex, cross-functional projects from conception through delivery.
• Exceptional written and verbal English communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Science/Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• scripting ability in Python, JavaScript, or shell

Benefits

• Generous and competitive US benefits
• New hire stock equity (RSUs)
• employee stock purchase plan
• Continuous career development and pathing opportunities
• Product training to develop an in-depth understanding of our product and space
• Best in breed onboarding
• Internal mentor and buddy program cross-departmentally
• Friendly and inclusive workplace culture

About the company

Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack. It is trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders.