Escalation Manager

What You'll Be Doing & Why It Matters

The Escalation Manager acts as incident commander for critical customer issues, engaging the right resources quickly. The role is hands-on and balances authoritative and collaborative modes depending on the situation.

You will build strong relationships with customers and with teams across Salesforce. These include Support for all cloud products, Engineering (Site Reliability, Customer Centric Engineering, Technology Communications, Readiness), CSIRT, Sales, Consulting, QA, Program Management, and Product Management.

The role has an operational focus on prevention. You will learn from cases and incidents and partner with other teams on initiatives that reduce or eliminate customer impact.

Core Responsibilities & Scope

• Own critical issues and Sev 1s across all clouds, and drive them to resolution with the appropriate teams.
• Represent Salesforce on customer bridges and engage customers to drive operational excellence.
• Manage incidents to meet targets for customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, service levels, resolution time, and project deadlines.
• Coordinate warm handoffs with other GEO and weekend escalation managers.
• Build trusted partnerships with Infrastructure, Engineering, Operations, Technical Support, Customer Success, Industry and Partners, and Sales Leadership to ensure company-wide alignment.
• Lead retrospectives to identify process improvements, and continuously improve service delivery.
• Deliver operational reports with qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance.

Minimum Requirements

• Degree or equivalent practical experience. We assess experience from any setting, such as work, military, volunteer, or leadership roles, based on the skills and behaviors this role requires.
• 7+ years in a technical support environment, handling highly sophisticated issues.
• 5+ years in support management, critical issue management, and incident response in a high-growth software or hardware technology organization.
• Strong cloud and infrastructure technology and delivery experience. Technical literacy is required, and deep knowledge of multi-tenant cloud systems and complex infrastructure is highly desirable.
• Experience managing customer concerns across multiple partners, including customers and product teams.
• Familiarity with incident management frameworks (ITIL, NIMS, NIST, SANS, etc.).
• Understanding of Salesforce product offerings is strongly preferred.

Core Skills & Competencies

• Incident command: Leads and prioritizes multiple critical issues at once, remotely and on customer bridges, with a high level of operational urgency.
• Executive communication: Exceptional C-level written and verbal skills. You tailor your message to the audience and explain technical issues to engineers and executives alike.
• Collaboration and influence: Builds productive relationships across the Critical Incident Center, partner organizations, and matrixed teams. You influence others to lead projects without formal authority.
• Project management and rigor: Strong operational discipline, with the ability to lead cross-functional work to results.
• Ownership: Self-motivated and takes initiative. You own outcomes, run programs with minimal direction, and escalate obstacles proactively.
• Service mindset: Customer-centric and focused on quality of service and continuous improvement.

What We're Looking For

We want someone who balances strategic thinking with operational execution, and who:

• Thrives under pressure. You stay composed in fast-paced, high-stakes situations, de-escalate tension, and lead with clarity and authority.
• Thinks in root causes. You want to understand why an escalation happened and prevent the next one. You connect individual cases to team and organizational outcomes.
• Designs bespoke solutions. You apply creative problem-solving to non-standard situations while preserving trust and relationships.
• Builds trust in tough moments. You set clear expectations and communicate with empathy, professionalism, and respect, even when things get hard.
• Operates with urgency and autonomy. You make decisions quickly, commit organizational resources when needed, and keep moving through ambiguity and shifting demands.
• Orchestrates across teams. You mobilize Engineering, SRE, Product, Support, CSIRT, and Sales around a shared goal, and you mediate conflicting priorities.
• Challenges the status quo. You make bold, well-reasoned recommendations and advocate for the customer, while staying open to other viewpoints.
• Embraces AI and new technology. You adopt emerging tools to solve problems and work more effectively, and you inspire peers to do the same.