Director, Escalation Management

Job Summary

The Director, Escalation Management is responsible for leading Escalation Management for Services, including a team of Escalation Engineers who serve as the technical escalation point for implementation and support issues before L3 Engineering. This role owns ITIL-aligned Problem Management and Release Management practices for Services, prioritizes escalations across customers and product lines, drives root cause analysis and corrective actions, and runs cross-functional defect review with Product and Engineering.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and develop Escalation Engineers, setting goals, priorities, and coverage across product lines and technology stacks.

Ensure implementation and support issues are triaged, reproduced, and fully documented before escalation to L3 Engineering.

Prioritize escalations across customers from a Services perspective, weighing customer impact, severity, business risk, and contractual commitments.

Own the ITIL Problem Management practice for Services, including problem identification, problem control, and error control, with problem records, known errors, and published workarounds.

Research, document, and publish root cause analysis (RCA) reports, and drive corrective and preventive actions to completion with Engineering, Product, and Platform teams.

Host a recurring Defect Review Board with each product line to agree defect priority, target fix versions, and owners, and publish outcomes to Services stakeholders.

Apply ITIL Release Management practices to track and communicate L3 ticket status and which product versions, patches, and hotfixes contain each fix.

Partner with Platform and Cloud Management to schedule and sequence patch and release upgrades to customer cloud environments to minimize customer impact.

Help customers and Services resources understand differences between end-of-life and new-stack products, and work with Product to identify and close functionality gaps.

Report on escalation volume, aging, fix status, upgrade schedules, and RCA outcomes, and lead communication for high-severity customer escalations.

PLEASE NOTE: This is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and requirements of the position described above. Other functions may be assigned and management retains the right to add or change duties at any time.

Minimum Qualifications, Education and Experience

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience (required).

10+ years of experience in enterprise software support, escalation engineering, sustaining engineering, or technical services (required).

5+ years leading technical teams (required).

Hands-on experience with ITIL Problem Management, including root cause analysis, known error management, and RCA reporting (required).

Working knowledge of ITIL Release Management, Deployment Management, and Change Enablement practices (required).

Experience coordinating software releases, patches, or upgrades in cloud or SaaS environments (required).

Experience running cross-functional defect triage or review forums with Product and Engineering (required).

Ability to prioritize competing needs across a large customer base and lead through influence (required).

Clear written and verbal communication with executives, customers, and technical staff (required).