Vapi

Incident and Escalation Manager

San Francisco · Exec

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 41 days ago

Incident ResponseCustomer SuccessCustomer SupportCadenceCommunicationPlain Language

About the role

Most phone systems trap callers in menus and scripts.
Today the response is run by whoever is in the Slack thread.
It does not scale, and it costs us renewals, engineering focus, and executive confidence every time it happens.

Build and train the incident commander rotation. Build a realistic balance of hiring and utilizing existing resources across humans and AI to stand up the rotation.
Build customer communication templates for each severity and channel, pre-approved so they are not written from scratch under pressure.

You can produce a clean read of a live situation for a senior leader, and a customer RCA that holds a relationship together.
8 to 12 years across incident management, escalation management, technical support escalations, or technical program management, ideally at an infrastructure, telephony, or platform company operating at scale.
A track record building an incident and escalation program from zero, or owning a meaningful piece of one through its growth, including standing up an incident commander rotation rather than being the sole responder. Experience hiring a team is a plus.
Calm under pressure as a learned discipline. Gravitas to direct a response and the willingness to remove a distraction from a call even when it outranks you.
Decision-making with incomplete information, and the judgment to know when to escalate and how to do it without losing time.
Clear writing under pressure. You can produce a clean read of a live situation for a senior leader, and a customer RCA that holds a relationship together.
Comfort with technical depth. You do not need to write the fix, but you need to follow the conversation, ask the right question, and know when an answer does not add up. Familiarity with telephony, carrier dynamics, or real-time systems is a strong plus.
Willingness to work part of the incident commander rotation, including off-hours shifts, especially in the first year.

Translate engineering root cause into plain language that tells the truth and holds the relationship.
Ship it within the SLA we commit to.
Run the blameless post-incident review.
Hold the high-severity customer issues that do not rise to a full incident but threaten a renewal or a relationship.
Run the standing executive escalation list.
Keep an owner, a next step, and a date on every item.
Be the single point of contact for a regulated customer or a regulatory inquiry that surfaces weeks after the technical fix.
Keep a written handoff and a named deputy so escalations stay covered when you are out.

Amazon Ring, ServiceTitan, New York Life, Intuit, Kavak, and thousands more, from YC startups to the Fortune 500
Own the pager and work part of the rotation yourself - personally commanding incidents during your shifts and stepping your share down as the bench matures and proves out. Own how the rotation runs regardless of whose shift it is.

This listing is sourced directly from Vapi's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.