Incident Commander

Responsibilities

• Serve as Incident Commander across the full range of severities, including most critical, cross-functional incidents. Orchestrate the incident process company-wide, own the accuracy of incident data, and set standards for how IR lifecycle milestones are met.
• Enforce incident response practices at the Director and VP level and shape which industry best practices Twilio adopts. Identify cross-org gaps and push product groups to prioritize fixes that delay MTTR or block the IR lifecycle. Run multiple concurrent workstreams — deviating from standard process when needed, even across simultaneous incidents.
• Keep VPs and C-level stakeholders informed with clear, timely updates during critical incidents. Own key Incident Command documentation and keep it current through change management. Drive quality and accuracy in incident data company-wide.
• Mentor and train Incident Commanders and engineering teams, with the goal of removing yourself as a single point of failure. Peer-review other ICs' work and surface trends that drive company-wide improvement. Bring genuine curiosity to every incident — asking "why" past the first plausible answer — and carry that same curiosity into Post Incident Review, helping Incident Owners surface real contributing factors and repair items.
• Help Product Managers deliver high-quality Reason For Outage documents within SLO, and drive Product Groups to meet their incident response SLAs/SLOs. Escalate customer issues to the right people, during and after an incident.
• Own the 1-3 year strategic vision for incident response process and tooling. Lead cross-org projects end-to-end with Product Group leadership and Program Managers. Influence C-level and VP leaders on IR direction, define company-wide standards, and set Response OKRs. Evaluate new tools and technology, and represent Twilio externally as a thought leader in incident response.

Qualifications

Required:

• 8+ years leading high-severity incident response, including as incident commander for the most critical incidents at a company operating at meaningful scale.
• Track record of driving company-wide incident response strategy and standards, including setting OKRs and leading multi-team, multi-region adoption over a 1-3 year horizon.
• Proven ability to influence and enforce practices at the Director/VP/C-suite level without formal authority; comfortable being the calm, authoritative voice in the room regardless of who's in it.
• Experience partnering across functions beyond engineering (e.g. Security, Support, Product) during incident response.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with experience conveying incident status and risk clearly to executives and customer-facing teams.
• Ability to size up a situation and make rapid decisions on the right course of action, including across multiple concurrent incidents.
• Experience mentoring and upleveling other incident commanders, aimed at raising all boats within a response organization.
• Deep understanding of the incident response lifecycle (Gameday, Incident Response, PIR, Betterments), including defining or refining it for an organization.
• Ability to lead cross-org projects end-to-end: defining milestones, managing risk, and driving them through formal change management.
• A curious, investigative mindset — asking "why" past the first plausible answer, both live during an incident and in retrospective, to find what's actually going on.

Desired:

• Understanding of modern engineering tech stack and tooling.
• Experience with Twilio products and services.
• Certification(s) in Incident Management (CEIM), Security Incident Management (CSIRT), ITIL, program management/project management, Six Sigma, Scrum, or similar.