Staff Technical Escalations Manager

About the Team:

The Escalations and Supportability team is part of the Outreach Support organization and is focused on reducing customer and internal friction by building predictable, data-driven processes that improve both customer outcomes and internal coordination. We partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to manage critical incidents, prevent recurrences, and drive long-term improvements in product quality and supportability. The team also owns the incident management and the red account program ensuring consistent processes, accountability, and communication across all major customer-impacting events.

The Role:

As a Staff Technical Escalations Manager at Outreach, you thrive on challenge, remain calm under pressure, and have a proven ability to navigate complex cross-functional issues where ownership, priority, customer impact, or resolution path may be unclear. You are a strong communicator, a systems thinker, and a trusted advocate for customers and internal teams alike. You are technically competent, process-oriented, and motivated by impact rather than urgency alone.

Outreach has a Red Account Program and an Incident Management Program, our frameworks for identifying, prioritizing, and managing high-impact customer and platform issues. We are looking for an individual who will own, scale, and continuously improve both programs, ensuring that critical incidents and escalations receive coordinated, proactive, and transparent communication across stakeholders. This role will also lead incident response coordination, post-mortem analysis, stakeholder alignment, and long-term risk mitigation.

You will partner with Product, Engineering, Success, Technical Account Management, and Support to ensure every escalation and incident has a clear owner, timeline, decision path, and communication plan. This is a highly cross-functional role that requires situational awareness, executive presence, communication judgment, organizational maturity, and operational discipline in complex, ambiguous, and leadership-visible situations. Periodic on-call or after-hours participation may be required to support urgent incidents.

This person will serve as the point of contact for the most complex and business-critical escalations, interacting across all levels of the organization to understand problems, clarify ambiguity, align stakeholders, negotiate solutions, and execute mitigation plans. You will be responsible for executive-level reporting, root-cause summaries, decision framing, and structured follow-up actions to ensure the customer sees measurable progress and internal teams address recurring drivers of escalation risk.

Location

We are open to hiring this position in the Atlanta or Seattle area. This will be a hybrid role (both in-office and remote).

• Owning complex, high-impact, and executive-visible customer escalations from initial triage through full resolution

• Strong strategic judgment in driving escalation and incident resolution, including the ability to identify the right stakeholders, build effective cross-functional partnerships, frame tradeoffs clearly, and align Product, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success around durable troubleshooting paths and long-term risk reduction.

• Leading coordination with internal stakeholders including Customer Success, Sales, Engineering, Operations, and Support to maintain alignment through every stage of the escalation lifecycle and resolve gaps in ownership, priority, communication, or decision-making

• Leading and maturing the global Incident Management Program and ensuring consistent response standards across all incident severities

• Running weekly Red Account and Incident Review meetings, ensuring next steps, accountability, and documentation are clear and that material risks, decisions, and escalation needs are surfaced to the right leaders

• Creating and refining scalable processes to reduce repeat escalations and improve systemic resilience where process is immature, unclear, or inconsistent across teams

• Documenting executive summaries, post-incident reviews, and contributing to the Supportability backlog with audience-specific recommendations, clear owners, and measurable follow-through

• Facilitating difficult conversations with clarity and composure, keeping the customer and internal teams aligned on progress when decisions involve ambiguity, tradeoffs, changing expectations, or competing priorities

• Delivering post-mortem analyses and lessons learned to strengthen future response and prevention efforts and converting recurring themes into durable operational improvements

• 7+ years of experience in technical escalation management, incident management, technical account management, or a similar customer-facing function

• Able to communicate effectively at multiple levels—translating complex technical detail for senior executives while engaging deeply with engineers and support teams to drive alignment, decisions, and accountability

• Proven track record of managing complex customer escalations and large-scale incident responses with confidence and credibility across senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams

• Experience engaging directly with executives and cross-functional leadership in high-pressure situations with executive presence, concise communication, sound judgment, and clear recommendations

• Demonstrated ability to drive organizational change through structured process improvement and influence across teams without direct authority

• Experience designing, scaling, or maturing an Incident Management or Major Incident Response program

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills with the ability to synthesize technical detail into business context and tailor communication to different audiences based on their needs, technical depth, urgency, and decision-making context

• Demonstrated ability to develop and maintain strong working knowledge of Outreach’s product, technical architecture, and supporting operational tools, with the ability to navigate them efficiently, apply that knowledge during escalations and incidents, and help others understand how to use available systems and information effectively.

• Calm, objective presence under pressure and a bias for accountability, clarity-seeking, adaptability, organizational judgment, influence, and closure