Incident Operations Lead – EMEA/AMER

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Oversee the team managing Alpaca's most significant incidents.

• Develop the incident operations function, which includes the severity model, escalation and communication pathways, 24x7 follow-the-sun coverage, and improvement KPIs.

• Recruit and certify Incident Commanders while establishing rotations across APAC, EMEA, and AMER with regional transitions.

• Hold a rostered incident-command position and mentor the team during live incidents.

• Facilitate game days, tabletop exercises, and simulations.

• Foster a culture of blameless reviews.

• Enhance severity maturity in collaboration with Risk regarding financial and regulatory significance.

• Manage escalation paths, unanswered-page protocols, engineering-leadership thresholds, and ownership of the service catalogue.

• Link engineers and technical support with partner communications teams during incidents.

• Ensure precise update frequencies and conduct retrospectives with SRE.

• Create post-incident packages that include ticketed, assigned, and tagged actions.

• Share clear incident insights with the engineering organization.

• Take ownership of response and mitigation KPIs, including definitions, data hygiene, baselines, and targets.

• Report overdue postmortem reviews along with subsequent actions.

• Develop a documented, version-controlled, and deployable incident-command product.

• Manage the roadmap for AI workflows and agents supporting incident setup, timelines, RCAs, action packages, and follow-up reminders.

⛳️ Requirements

• You have established an incident command or major-incident function, taking responsibility for the severity model, creating the roster, and promoting adoption across teams.

• Over 5 years of experience in production engineering, SRE, or technical operations, including direct management of high-severity incidents.

• Proven ability to lead a distributed team across various time zones and manage a 24x7 rotation.

• Capacity to influence engineers you do not directly manage and justify severity decisions.

• Experience in building reliable metrics and differentiating metric improvement from genuine enhancements.

• Strong scope discipline during outages.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including delivering executive briefings during incidents.

• Knowledge of FinTech and the trust implications of API-driven financial platforms.

• Utilization of AI and agentic automation to reduce manual tasks.

• Formal incident command training, such as ITIL, Major Incident Management, or crisis management, is a plus.

• Experience with certification, game day, or drill programs is a plus.

• Familiarity with modern incident management and on-call platforms is a plus.

• Experience in developing and maintaining service catalogues or ownership registries is a plus.

• Experience in converting incident follow-ups into funded roadmap projects is a plus.

• Knowledge of DORA, Reg SCI, FINRA, or similar reporting obligations is a plus.

• Experience in online securities trading, capital markets, or other regulated, market-sensitive sectors is a plus.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Stock Options

• Health Benefits

• New Hire Home-Office Setup: One-time USD $500

• Monthly Stipend: USD $150 per month via a Brex Card