Senior Escalation & Incident Manager, Docker
$107.2-134k
+ Equity
AWS
GCP
Azure
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, US
More information about location
App development platform
Open for applications
App development platform
1001+ employees
B2BInternal toolsSaaSDevOpsCloud Computing
Open for applications
$107.2-134k
+ Equity
AWS
GCP
Azure
Senior and Expert level
Remote from Canada, US
More information about location
1001+ employees
B2BInternal toolsSaaSDevOpsCloud Computing
Company mission
To simplify the lives of developers building world-changing apps.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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 critical issues threaten to erode trust or impact retention
- 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
- 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
Our take
Docker supplies a hub and desktop solution to simplify the workflow of app development teams. Originally known for popularising the idea of containerising software, it saw itself outpaced by Kubernetes. However, the company has identified a problem with the growing complexity of containerisation, with some apps consisting of dozens or even hundreds of containers - which is what it now addresses.
Docker has had a difficult time in the past, with 2019 seeing it sell off its enterprise business, reduce its workforce by hundreds, and change its leadership team. As a well known brand and ecosystem for containerisation, however, it aims to lure developers back to its product as well as to take advantage of the growing global demand for app development.
Returning to focus on developers rather than large companies was certainly a gamble, but one that seems to have paid off. The company has returned to profitability and raised Series C funding in 2022, which has been used to hire new talent, ramping up its business, and continuing to develop and refine its product. On top of this bounce back to success, it's also embarked on a series of acquisitions to bolster its business.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
47% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 13 rounds)
Mar 2022
$105m
SERIES C
Mar 2021
$23m
SERIES B
Total funding: $526m
Company benefits
- 100% company paid medical premiums for employees and dependents
- Flexible Time Off Policy
- Employer Paid Holidays
- Generous Parental Leave (after 6 months of employment)
- Home Office Set Up Budget
- Monthly Technology Stipend
- Training Allowances
- Life and Disability Insurance
- Retirement Plans
- Virtual and In-Person Social Events
- Docker Swag
- Quarterly Hackathons
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Don Johnson
(CEO)Prior to joining Docker in 2025, Don spent nearly 9 years at Oracle in various Engineering/VP roles. Before that, they spent over 7 years at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer and Principal Engineer.
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