Incident Commander

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +5 more states.

📋 Description

• Act as the Incident Commander for a variety of severities, including our most critical, cross-functional incidents.

• Implement incident response protocols at the Director and VP levels, influencing the adoption of industry best practices at Twilio.

• Provide clear and timely updates to VPs and C-level stakeholders during critical incidents.

• Guide and train Incident Commanders and engineering teams to eliminate reliance on a single point of failure.

• Assist Product Managers in producing high-quality Reason For Outage documents within Service Level Objectives (SLO), and drive Product Groups to adhere to their incident response Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and SLOs.

• Take ownership of the strategic vision for incident response processes and tooling over a 1-3 year timeframe.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience leading high-severity incident responses, including serving as incident commander for the most significant incidents at a large-scale company.

• Proven experience in shaping company-wide incident response strategies and standards, including establishing OKRs and facilitating multi-team, multi-region implementation over a 1-3 year period.

• Demonstrated ability to influence and enforce practices at the Director/VP/C-suite level without formal authority; able to remain a calm and authoritative presence in any situation.

• Experience collaborating across various functions beyond engineering (e.g., Security, Support, Product) during incident responses.

• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with a track record of effectively communicating incident status and risks to executives and customer-facing teams.

• Capacity to assess situations and make swift decisions regarding the appropriate course of action, even in the face of multiple concurrent incidents.

• Experience mentoring and enhancing the skills of other incident commanders, with the intention of improving the overall capability within the response organization.

• Comprehensive understanding of the incident response lifecycle (Gameday, Incident Response, Post-Incident Review, Improvements), including the ability to define or refine it for an organization.

• Skill in leading cross-organizational projects from inception to completion: establishing milestones, managing risks, and navigating formal change management processes.

• An inquisitive, investigative mindset — consistently asking "why" beyond the initial plausible answer, both during incidents and in retrospectives, to uncover the underlying issues.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health care insurance

• 401(k) retirement account

• Paid sick time

• Paid personal time off

• Paid parental leave