Technical Customer Escalation Manager
$106,500–$140,500 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States or Seattle, Washington, United States
Job Summary
Own the full lifecycle of high-priority customer escalations, from intake and triage through active management, resolution, and post-escalation review, serving as the single operational point of coordination. Drive urgency and accountability across internal teams by establishing clear issue ownership, tracking action items, surfacing blockers proactively, and holding teams to committed timelines. Develop executive-ready status updates that translate complex technical details into concise summaries for leadership and stakeholders. Facilitate escalation cadence calls and cross-functional syncs to align Support, Engineering, Product, and Customer Success around issue status and next steps. Maintain disciplined escalation hygiene by keeping tickets, trackers, and communication threads current and audit-ready. Author clear resolution statements, root cause summaries, and path-forward documentation. Partner with leadership to identify at-risk customers and communicate escalation status proactively. Identify escalation trends through ongoing analysis to drive actionable recommendations for process and product improvements. Build and refine escalation playbooks and operating standards to improve consistency and reduce time-to-clarity. Track and report on key escalation metrics including time-to-resolution and repeat issue rates to drive continuous improvement. Serve as part of the escalation on-call rotation for P0 and high-severity issues, driving initial triage and cross-functional coordination until resolution.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelors and/or Masters degree in a technical discipline (Computer Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) or other quantitative field
- 5+ years of experience in technical support, escalation management, incident management, technical account management, customer success operations, or a related post-sales technical environment
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder situations under pressure—with a track record of establishing clear ownership and driving teams toward resolution
- Able to translate technical details (API failures, data pipeline issues, integration errors, platform outages) into clear, accurate, executive-ready language without losing credibility with technical audiences
- Structured and precise communicator by default: written updates are concise, action items have owners, timelines are explicit, and nothing falls through the cracks
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving situations; able to establish a working plan and adjust as new information surfaces
- Familiar enough with SaaS platforms, APIs, data workflows, or enterprise software environments to ask strong diagnostic questions and engage credibly with engineering teams—without needing to be a software engineer
- Experienced working across functions—including Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and Sales—and skilled at managing competing priorities without losing sight of customer impact
- Sound judgment about when to escalate, when to hold steady, and when to loop in executive stakeholders
- Ability and availability to be on call on weeknights and weekends
- Strong project management skills in a SaaS environment, including keeping escalations within scope, managing timelines and dependencies, and maintaining a clear critical path across agile Product, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success teams
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with support ticketing or escalation management tools such as Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, JIRA, PagerDuty, or equivalent platforms
- Familiarity with data connectivity, identity resolution, AdTech, MarTech, or data collaboration ecosystems
- Experience building or refining escalation playbooks, runbooks, post-mortem frameworks, or similar operational documentation
- Background in technical program management, support engineering, or site reliability adjacent roles
- Exposure to enterprise SLA management, customer communication frameworks, or support operations at scale
- Project management certification (PMP) or process improvement training (Lean Six Sigma) is a plus
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