# Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Technical Program Management
**Salary:** $234k – $315k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Incident Management, Incident Commander, Pagerduty, Datadog, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, SRE, Technical Program Management, On-Call Operations
**Posted:** 2026-06-15

> Hands-on lead building and running OpenAI's Incidents & Escalations function. Owns on-call incident command, customer escalations, cross-functional coordination, post-incident retrospectives, and long-term process improvements.

## Job Description

## In This Role, You Will
- Participate in an on-call rotation and serve as the active incident lead during live incidents and urgent escalations.
- Own alert intake and triage process across support, safety, customer, and service-impacting issues.
- Assess severity, determine scope and impact, and initiate the appropriate response path.
- Page and coordinate Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, Legal, Policy, Go-To-Market, and other teams as needed.
- Lead incident response calls, manage timelines, clarify roles, and keep responders focused and unblocked.
- Set internal guidelines for incident communications to all users, including enterprise customers, and own internal updates, executive briefings, customer-facing updates, and external status page updates where required.
- Maintain situational awareness across all customer-facing incidents and parallel workstreams, ensuring the response remains coordinated and customer impact is understood.
- Create and operate the process for monitoring, processing, mitigating, and resolving critical escalations, including formal closure and handoff.
- Identify root causes behind incidents and escalations, lead retrospectives, and coordinate corrective action with accountable teams.
- Track corrective actions to closure and ensure follow-through is focused on the best possible customer outcome.
- Identify recurring operational issues, escalation patterns, and product or process gaps.
- Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Product and Support leaders to stay ahead of customer-facing incidents, reduce repeat issues, and improve readiness.
- Improve incident response processes, severity frameworks, playbooks, tooling, reporting, and automation.
- Build a durable operating model for incidents and escalations as OpenAI scales globally.

## You Might Thrive In This Role If You
- Have 10+ years of experience in incident management, technical support, escalation management, SRE, technical program management, or production operations.
- Have 5+ years of hands-on experience working in production, on-call, or high-urgency operational environments.
- Have 5+ years of leadership experience, ideally in a Support, Engineering, or similar environment.
- Are comfortable acting as Incident Commander, owning coordination, decision-making, communication, and accountability during live incidents.
- Have direct experience with customer-impacting incidents, executive escalations, safety-sensitive escalations, or high-severity technical issues.
- Can communicate clearly under pressure with engineers, support teams, executives, customer-facing teams, and external stakeholders.
- Have hands-on experience with incident communications, including internal updates, executive briefings, customer updates, and status pages.
- Are experienced with incident management, paging, and alerting tools such as incident.io, PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, or similar systems.
- Understand monitoring and observability well enough to reason about alerts, system health, customer impact, and incident scope.
- Can lead post-incident retrospectives that produce clear root causes, corrective actions, and durable improvements.
- Drive action items to closure and hold teams accountable without creating unnecessary process drag.
- Are highly organized, calm, and structured in ambiguous or high-pressure situations.
- Can balance hands-on incident execution with longer-term systems building.
- Are excited to use AI and automation to improve triage, routing, summarization, reporting, knowledge management, and incident follow-through.

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