Escalation Manager

Salesforce•Chicago, IL

About The Position

The Escalation Manager acts as incident commander for critical customer issues, engaging the appropriate resources quickly. The role balances authoritative and collaborative approaches, builds strong relationships with customers and teams across Salesforce, and focuses operationally on prevention. The manager learns from cases and incidents and partners with other teams on initiatives that reduce or eliminate customer impact. The role works with teams including Support across cloud products, Engineering, Site Reliability, Customer Centric Engineering, Technology Communications, Readiness, CSIRT, Sales, Consulting, QA, Program Management, and Product Management. It requires strategic thinking alongside hands-on operational execution, particularly in high-stakes situations, and calls for strong customer advocacy, sound judgment, autonomy, and the ability to coordinate across teams.

Requirements

Degree or equivalent practical experience; experience may come from work, military, volunteer, or leadership settings.
At least 7 years in a technical support environment handling highly sophisticated issues.
At least 5 years in support management, critical issue management, and incident response in a high-growth software or hardware technology organization.
Strong cloud and infrastructure technology and delivery experience.
Technical literacy.
Experience managing customer concerns across multiple partners, including customers and product teams.
Familiarity with incident management frameworks such as ITIL, NIMS, NIST, or SANS.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including communication with C-level audiences and the ability to explain technical issues to engineers and executives.
Ability to lead and prioritize multiple critical issues, including remotely and on customer bridges.
Ability to build productive relationships and influence cross-functional teams without formal authority.
Strong operational discipline and project management skills.
Self-motivation, initiative, ownership of outcomes, and ability to work with minimal direction.
Customer-centric service mindset focused on quality and continuous improvement.
Ability to stay composed under pressure, de-escalate tension, make timely decisions, and work through ambiguity and changing demands.

Nice To Haves

Deep knowledge of multi-tenant cloud systems and complex infrastructure.
Understanding of Salesforce product offerings.
Experience adopting emerging AI tools and other new technology to solve problems and improve effectiveness.

Responsibilities

Own critical issues and Sev 1 incidents across all clouds and drive them to resolution with the appropriate teams.
Represent Salesforce on customer bridges and engage customers to drive operational excellence.
Manage incidents against customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, service-level, resolution-time, and project-deadline targets.
Coordinate warm handoffs with other GEO and weekend escalation managers.
Build partnerships with Infrastructure, Engineering, Operations, Technical Support, Customer Success, Industry and Partners, and Sales Leadership to support company-wide alignment.
Lead retrospectives, identify process improvements, and continuously improve service delivery.
Deliver operational reports with qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance.
Mobilize cross-functional teams around shared goals, mediate conflicting priorities, and commit organizational resources when needed.
Identify root causes of escalations and recommend initiatives to prevent future customer impact.