Senior Manager, Incident Management

Zillow

7d•$125,800 - $211,600•Onsite

About The Position

Zillow Group is seeking a Senior Manager, Incident Management (M4) to lead our incident and problem management function and elevate how we drive operational excellence across production systems. This role owns the strategy, process, and people behind incident response and problem management, ensuring we not only resolve incidents quickly but prevent recurrence and continuously raise the bar on reliability. At the M4 level, success is anchored in four core areas: Program Leadership: building and scaling the incident and problem management practice across the organization; Problem Management: driving structured root cause analysis and systemic fixes that reduce repeat incidents; AI-Enabled Operations: leveraging AI workflows and tooling to increase the speed, quality, and actionability of incident and problem outputs for internal partners; and People Leadership: developing a high-performing team of incident managers and setting the standard for operational rigor.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in incident management, SRE, technical operations, or a related field, including 2+ years of people management experience (or equivalent combination of education and experience)
Proven track record building or scaling an incident management and/or problem management program
Strong understanding of structured incident management practices (triage, escalation, post-incident review) and formal problem management methodologies
Experience leveraging AI tools or workflows (e.g., LLM-based summarization, automation, analytics) to improve operational speed and output quality
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to distill complex technical situations into clear, actionable updates for executives and internal partners
Demonstrated sound judgment, composure, and decision-making under pressure during high-severity or ambiguous situations
Experience coaching and developing incident managers or similar operational talent
Comfortable partnering across Engineering, Product, Support, and business leadership to drive alignment and accountability

Nice To Haves

Experience with incident management/on-call tooling (e.g., Rootly, JIRA, ServiceNow) and AI-driven operations tooling
Exposure to distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or large-scale consumer applications

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end incident management program, including process design, tooling, and governance across the organization
Serve as executive escalation point and senior decision-maker for critical, high-severity, or cross-functional incidents
Set and enforce standards for incident severity classification, escalation paths, and communication protocols
Partner with Engineering, Product, and business leadership to align incident response with business priorities and risk tolerance
Drive executive-level incident communications, ensuring leadership has clear, timely, and accurate visibility into impact and status
Build and own a formal problem management practice that connects incident trends to systemic root causes
Ensure every significant incident produces a rigorous, blameless root cause analysis (RCA) with clearly owned, tracked corrective actions
Establish mechanisms to identify recurring issues, chronic risks, and process gaps across incident history
Hold cross-functional partners accountable for closing problem records and remediation items on committed timelines
Report on problem management outcomes and reliability trends to leadership, tying them to measurable risk reduction
Champion the adoption of AI-powered tooling and workflows across incident detection, triage, summarization, and RCA drafting
Design and continuously improve AI-assisted workflows that turn raw incident and problem data into clear, actionable insights for internal partners
Ensure AI-generated call-outs, summaries, and reports meet a high bar for accuracy, relevance, and actionability before reaching stakeholders
Identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational tasks (documentation, status updates, trend analysis) to free the team to focus on higher-value judgment work
Partner with Engineering and Data teams to pilot, evaluate, and scale new AI capabilities that improve mean-time-to-resolution and mean-time-to-detection
Hire, coach, and develop a team of incident managers, building depth and bench strength across severity levels
Set clear performance expectations and career growth paths for the team
Establish on-call structures, workload balance, and rotations that sustain team health and reliability coverage
Foster a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and blameless learning within the team
Define and track key metrics (MTTR, MTTD, recurrence rate, action-item closure rate) to measure program health and impact
Continuously refine runbooks, tooling, and workflows based on retrospectives and data trends
Facilitate post-incident reviews for major incidents, ensuring lessons learned translate into concrete process or system changes
Benchmark practices against industry standards and bring in outside best practices where relevant