Staff Incident Manager

Job Description

Why This Role? Why Now?

As a Staff Incident Manager at Zendesk, you will drive process improvement, be the key contributor to Proactive Problem Management, and support Severity 0 and Severity 1 production incidents by coordinating engineering response efforts as they occur. This includes coordinating all activities associated with the Engineering Incident Management process. You will support teams across the organization, primarily Engineering, Product Development, and Customer Advocacy, in responding to, investigating, managing, and resolving product incidents and working to resolve underlying problems—all while helping mentoring other Incident & Escalation members on our team.

In this global role based in Manila, you will serve as a high-impact technical process leader, driving platform reliability during critical EMEA/AMER operational windows, ensuring our incident response structures remain best-in-class in an AI-first era.

What You'll Be Doing

• Severity 0 Command: Run and facilitate the incident response as the Incident Commander for Severity 0 production incidents, managing documentation and coordinating detailed, timely stakeholder communications with customer-facing counterparts.

• Proactive Problem Management: Lead data analysis and root cause workflows across engineering teams to uncover hidden systemic patterns and drive proactive reliability upgrades.

• Metric Optimization: Drive down Median Time to Respond (MTTR) by continuously analyzing response behavior and optimizing engineering run books.

• Post-Incident Remediation: Facilitate blameless retrospective review forums with a global audience, managing the ticket creation, tracking, and prioritization of technical remediation projects.

• Process Evolution: Champion industry trends to ensure Zendesk’s Engineering Incident Management frameworks, system dashboards, and training documentation remain best-in-class.

• On-Call Support: Participate in an engineering on-call rotation when required to support global platform infrastructure.

Who We're Looking For

We are looking for a crisis leader who possesses a blend of deep technical architecture awareness, unyielding analytical precision, and an Adult-to-Adult management mindset. You are someone who thrives when leading cross-functional engineering teams through high-stakes, ambiguous production failures, communicating with clarity and empathy, and anchoring every response inside an AI-augmented ecosystem.

What You Bring to the Role

• Expert knowledge of Incident and Problem Management ITIL terms and practice, along with broad knowledge of overall ITIL terminology.

• Experience facilitating reviews of technical incidents, documenting actions, and encouraging cooperative problem-solving across engineering disciplines.

• Strong communication and business acumen, with the ability to ensure a consistently high level of customer satisfaction.

• Clear understanding of IT operational processes, software development paradigms, and common SaaS provider architecture.

• Enthusiasm for working in a fast-paced environment while remaining highly analytical and detail-oriented.

• Proactive mindset, with excellent decision-making skills and the ability to identify, prioritize, and articulate the highest-impact tasks.

• Ability to independently meet and own deliverables, driving your work to completion within specified timelines from start to finish across organizations.

• Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal, with a strong attention to detail.

• A collaborative, upbeat work ethic where you take clear ownership and have fun doing it!

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years of specialized experience in Incident and Problem Management within an enterprise SaaS, IaaS, or cloud hosting environment.

• Proven track record leading cross-functional engineering responses for high-severity outages (Severity 0 / Severity 1).

• Must be fully flexible to work permanent rotated schedules aligning with AMER or EMEA time zones from Manila.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL v4 Managing Professional or Strategic Leader Certification.

• Hands-on experience using AI-driven automation, LLMs, or agentic triaging tools within an incident response lifecycle.

• Experience practicing blameless postmortems across highly matrixed, global organizations.

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The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.