**Introduction** A career in IBM Software means you'll be part of a team that transforms our customer's challenges into industry-leading solutions. We are an infinitely curious team, always seeking new possibilities, and dedicated to creating the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our network of IBMers. We are a team of deep product experts, ensuring exceptional client experiences, with a focus on delivery, excellence, and obsession over customer outcomes. This position involves contributing to HashiCorp's offerings, now part of IBM, which empower organizations to automate and secure multi-cloud and hybrid environments. You will join a team managing the lifecycle of infrastructure and security, enhancing IBM's cloud solutions to ensure enterprises achieve efficiency, security, and scalability in their cloud journey. **Your role and responsibilities** HashiCorp is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Sr. Support Escalation Manager to join our Cloud Support Engineering team. This role is ideal for an individual with a strong background in cloud technologies, technical escalation management, and exceptional interpersonal skills. You will be responsible for ensuring the prompt and satisfactory resolution of Severity-1 Cloud Incidents (system-down or degradation) and customer-initiated ticket escalations. This will involve close collaboration with our Support, Cloud SRE, and R&D teams, as well as direct communication with our customers. Additionally, you will contribute to various value-added tasks and projects that enhance our support operations. In this role, you will: ● Lead the resolution of escalated customer tickets by coordinating efforts between the customer and internal HashiCorp teams. ● Actively participate in the resolution of Cloud incidents, working in conjunction with the Cloud SRE and R&D teams. ● Translate complex technical resolution plans from the Cloud SRE and R&D teams into clear and concise updates for both senior leadership and clients. ● Ensure adherence to internal processes during client-fleetwide outages, including cross-functional team collaboration, meticulous ticket hygiene, and the orchestration of communications to affected clients. ● Serve as the primary advocate for the customer's perspective within the Cloud SRE and R&D teams, ensuring that resolution efforts remain focused on addressing client issues effectively. ● Develop and disseminate regular communications to keep internal and external stakeholders informed of the latest status, progress, and action items during critical incidents. ● Contribute to the technical incident retrospective process, collaborating with relevant technical teams and working with HashiCorp Cloud SRE and R&D teams to identify permanent remediations and provide recommendations to clients. ● Guide clients to optimize their product usage or internal configurations to enhance solution robustness and scalability, ideally aligning with HashiCorp product best practices. ● Provide insightful analysis of escalation trends, drivers, and statistics to senior leadership. ● Confidently deliver presentations to large audiences, including C-suite leadership, VPs, directors, and client leadership. ● Proactively work to reduce the number of escalations and incidents over time through trend analysis and continuous improvement of support processes. ● Undertake "peacetime" projects and tasks, such as developing or refining training content, knowledge base articles, quality assessments, support and escalation management processes, and participating in interviews. For those with a support engineering background, there may be opportunities to handle Cloud support tickets to maintain product knowledge and assist with workload balancing. ● Participate in the Cloud escalation management team's on-call rotation, ensuring seamless handovers of critical issues to other Cloud Support Centers or regions. **Required technical and professional expertise** ● 10+ years of proven experience in Support Engineering, Professional Services, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)/DevOps. ● 3+ years of experience in a leadership role managing technical escalations or incidents. ● The ability to maintain composure and de-escalate critical situations while providing reassurance to all stakeholders. ● Exceptional communication skills, demonstrating the ability to collaborate effectively with diverse partners, including senior leadership and cross-functional teams. ● A strong ability to negotiate and influence clients to adopt HashiCorp's recommended solutions. ● Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and logical reasoning skills. ● A profound understanding of DevOps Engineering, Software Engineering, or System Administration. ● Hands-on experience working with major Cloud Providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). ● Experience working with large Enterprise clients. **Preferred technical and professional experience** ● Familiarity with distributed systems, microservice architectures, and containerization technologies. ● A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.