Incident and Escalation Manager

About the Role

DDN is seeking a senior incident and escalation leader to join its Global Services and Support organization in the United States. The position is focused on steering the most serious customer-impacting issues, handling executive-level escalations, and improving the systems and processes that support service reliability across a global client base.

This opportunity sits within a company recognized for its work in AI infrastructure and high-performance data storage. DDN serves demanding environments across life sciences, healthcare, financial services, autonomous vehicles, government, academia, research, and manufacturing. The role is suited to someone who can remain composed in high-pressure situations, coordinate across multiple functions, and bring structure and clarity when customer confidence is at risk.

What You'll Do

• Take command of major incidents and severe service disruptions affecting AI, HPC, and enterprise environments.
• Act as the incident lead for the most complex and highly visible situations, bringing together Support, Engineering, and Field teams for rapid response.
• Run structured incident handling, including technical triage, coordination across teams, live decision-making, and restoration of service.
• Communicate clearly and promptly with executives, account teams, and customers throughout critical incidents.
• Own resolution of escalations at the executive level when standard handling paths are no longer effective.
• Work with Sales leadership, Customer Success, and Engineering to close out difficult technical or service issues affecting strategic accounts.
• Lead executive briefings, build recovery plans, align stakeholders across the organization, and rebuild customer trust through transparency and decisive action.
• Improve DDN’s incident, escalation, and problem management practices across Global Services.
• Refine major incident processes, escalation workflows, post-incident review practices, and systemic problem tracking and prevention.
• Help define governance, response standards, and operating frameworks with leadership.
• Drive improvements in MTTA, MTTR, escalation handling, and overall service reliability.
• Facilitate formal post-incident and escalation reviews for major events.
• Perform root cause analysis across both technical and operational areas.
• Identify recurring weaknesses and ensure corrective and preventive actions are completed.
• Study incident and escalation trends to provide actionable insights and continuous improvement recommendations.
• Influence Engineering and Product teams to address reliability and supportability concerns.
• Act as a customer advocate and trusted point of contact during crisis situations.
• Bring the customer perspective into internal discussions to support product and service improvements.
• Work with executive leadership to ensure important customers receive consistent and high-quality incident management support.

What We're Looking For

• 12 or more years of experience in incident management, escalation management, problem management, or technical operations within high-tech or enterprise IT environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading severe incidents and executive escalations in AI, HPC, or large-scale infrastructure settings.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotations, including evenings, weekends, and holidays.
• Ability to coordinate across time zones and guide global teams during live incidents.
• Confidence working in stressful, customer-facing situations with strong judgment and decision-making skills.
• A strong technical foundation and the ability to understand complex systems while partnering closely with Engineering.
• Solid understanding of ITIL practices, especially incident, problem, change, and escalation management.
• Excellent communication skills for both technical audiences and executive stakeholders.
• Strong analytical ability with the capacity to interpret data and produce useful reporting.
• A customer-first mindset and a persistent, solution-oriented approach.
• Experience influencing people and teams without direct reporting authority.
• Preferred experience includes AI, HPC, or large-scale data infrastructure support.
• Familiarity with parallel file systems such as Lustre or with distributed storage architectures is an advantage.
• Background in 24x7 support or cloud services operations is preferred.
• Knowledge of software development lifecycle practices and modern DevOps methods is helpful.
• ITIL v3 or v4 certification is preferred.
• Experience using Salesforce, Jira, Microsoft Office, Slack, and Confluence is preferred.

Additional Information

DDN describes itself as a company built on innovation, customer focus, and market leadership in AI and data storage. The organization values employees who are self-directed, achievement-oriented, strong problem solvers, and innovative in improving business processes.

DDN is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sex stereotyping, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.