[Hiring] Incident & Escalation Lead @GitLab

Role Description

Support Engineering at GitLab believes that healthy teams deliver a healthy customer experience, and that command during a crisis shouldn't fall to whoever happens to be senior and available. GitLab's global Incident & Escalation Management (IM/EM) function coordinates critical incidents, complex multi-team engagements, and executive-level escalations for enterprise customers. As Escalation Manager, you'll own complex, executive, and commercial escalations where customer trust and the relationship are at stake, alongside or independently of a technical issue.

In this functional role, you'll advocate for customers inside GitLab, coordinate teams toward resolution, and lead relationship repair after the event.

What you'll do

• Own complex, executive, and commercial escalations end-to-end, as defined in GitLab's IM/EM engagement model.
• Advocate for customers internally and coordinate Engineering, Support, Product, Customer Success, and Sales toward resolution, tracking commitments and holding owning teams accountable to agreed dates and deliverables.
• Maintain a written, customer-facing resolution plan from engagement through confirmed resolution, updating it at each communication milestone.
• Coordinate with Incident Managers during concurrent technical incidents to maintain a single, coherent narrative for the customer.
• Own external escalation communications using GitLab's approved templates and cadence, and represent GitLab in high-stakes customer conversations where clarity and ownership influence retention.
• Engage Sales, Customer Success, and executive stakeholders as needed, including executive-to-executive communication for Severity 1 and 2 events. Brief GitLab leadership with concise summaries that distinguish what's known, what's unknown, and next steps.
• Lead post-escalation reviews and relationship repair plans, contribute corrective actions with named owners and due dates to postmortems, and hand the relationship back to the account's Customer Success Manager at resolution.
• Partner with the Head of IM/EM to develop playbooks, communication templates, and process improvements based on patterns from escalations.

Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise technical support, customer success, or incident and escalation management at a business-to-business software-as-a-service or enterprise software company.
• A track record of owning complex, multi-stakeholder escalations end-to-end, including executive customer engagements and structured resolution or account plans.
• Executive-level written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical detail into plain-language updates for customers and GitLab leadership.
• The ability to coordinate Engineering, Support, Product, Customer Success, and Sales under pressure without formal authority over those teams.
• Calm, structured decision-making with incomplete information and the ability to provide a steadying presence in high-stress customer situations.
• Proficiency with support and coordination tools such as Zendesk, Salesforce, Slack, and PagerDuty, or equivalent platforms.
• Availability for on-call coverage supporting executive escalations as part of a globally distributed team.

Requirements

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundation or equivalent certification.
• Customer-facing experience with GitLab, development, security, and operations (DevSecOps), continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), or cloud-native products.
• Experience with formal escalation or incident command frameworks.
• Experience with AI-assisted support tools for triage, sentiment analysis, or resolution drafting.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Team Member Resource Groups
• Equity Compensation & Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Growth and Development Fund
• Parental Leave

Company Description

GitLab is the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps. GitLab enables organizations to increase developer productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce security and compliance risk, and accelerate digital transformation. More than 50 million registered users and more than 50% of the Fortune 100 trust GitLab to ship better, more secure software faster.

Our high-performance culture is driven by our values and continuous knowledge exchange, enabling our team members to reach their full potential while collaborating with industry leaders to solve complex problems.