Escalations Manager

Crusoe•San Francisco, CA

6h•$145,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Crusoe Cloud runs some of the most demanding AI workloads in the world on large-scale GPU infrastructure. When something goes wrong for a customer, the path from first report to root cause often crosses several teams: Support Engineering, Product Engineering, SRE, Networking, Storage, and Data Center Operations. As Escalation Manager, you'll own that path. Reporting to the Director, Customer Support Engineering, within Cloud Go-To-Market, you'll be the bridge between Customer Support and Engineering. You'll track every escalation and customer-impacting incident from start to finish, make sure the right engineers are engaged and moving, and keep customers and stakeholders informed. Then you'll look across all of it to find the patterns, turn them into supportability requests the Product team can act on, and drive the escalation rate down over time. You'll work side by side with the Senior Manager, Customer Support, who leads and develops the Support Engineering team. They build the team's technical depth; you make sure the path from Support to Engineering is fast, visible, and needed less often. Together, you'll help support engineers take more ownership of their cases, both before and after they escalate.

Requirements

5+ years in technical support, support engineering, escalation management, incident management, or SRE/operations in a cloud, infrastructure, or SaaS environment
2+ years owning escalations or incidents that span multiple engineering teams
A solid technical foundation in cloud infrastructure, including Linux, networking, virtualization, and Kubernetes: enough to read logs, follow a technical investigation, and hold your own with engineers
A track record of reducing escalation volume or resolution time through process, tooling, or product changes
Comfort with data: building dashboards and reports (SQL, Looker, Tableau, Sheets, or similar) and turning them into clear recommendations
Hands-on experience with tools such as Zendesk, Jira or incident.io, and Slack
Calm, clear communication under pressure, in writing and live, with customers, engineers, and executives
The ability to influence without authority and hold cross-functional teams to their commitments
Experience in a fast-paced organization going through rapid growth

Nice To Haves

Experience with GPU compute, HPC, InfiniBand or RoCE networking, or AI/ML training and inference infrastructure
A background as a support engineer or SRE before moving into escalation management
Experience standing up an escalation or problem management function from scratch
Scripting or automation skills (Python, Bash) to streamline workflows
ITIL or other incident and problem management certification

Responsibilities

Define and maintain escalation criteria, severity definitions, and handoff standards so support engineers know when to escalate, how to escalate, and what an escalation-ready case looks like
Build and publish reporting on escalation volume and rate, time to engage, time to resolve, aging, and top drivers by product area and customer, for Support, Engineering, and Product leadership to use in their decisions
Improve the tooling and workflows between the support platform and engineering trackers, such as Zendesk and Jira, so escalations move faster with less manual work
Own the end-to-end lifecycle of every escalation from Support to Engineering: intake, triage, routing, follow-through, and closure
Keep a single source of truth for all active escalations and customer-impacting incidents, each with a clear owner, next step, and ETA, so nothing ages without someone noticing
Own the supportability backlog with Product, track requests through to delivery, and close the loop with the support team on what shipped
Own escalation rate as a core KPI, set reduction targets with the Director, and lead the initiatives that bring escalation rate and time to resolve down quarter over quarter
Act as the primary bridge between Support Engineers and Engineering teams, unblocking stalled issues and escalating further when needed
Run recurring escalation reviews with Engineering to keep aging issues moving
Join incident response for customer-impacting events: coordinate support-side communication, track affected customers, and make sure follow-ups land after resolution
Give clear, timely status updates to customers, account teams, and leadership on high-severity and high-visibility issues
File, prioritize, and advocate for supportability requests with Product, including better logging, diagnostics, observability, error messages, self-service tooling, and internal admin capabilities that let Support resolve issues without Engineering
Bring the customer's voice into product planning with data, not anecdotes
Review escalations regularly to identify recurring issues, product gaps, knowledge gaps, and process breakdowns
Feed findings into postmortems, runbooks, and knowledge base articles, and partner with the Senior Manager, Customer Support on training that closes the gaps the escalation data reveals
Coach support engineers to troubleshoot further, own cases end to end, and actively drive their escalations instead of handing them off