Senior Manager, Technical Excellence & Escalations

Tenable•Boston, MA

13d•$130,000 - $173,333•Hybrid

About The Position

Tenable is the Exposure Management company, relied upon by over 40,000 organizations globally to understand and reduce cyber risk. Our global employees support a significant portion of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, as well as large government agencies. We foster a culture of belonging, respect, and excellence, where employees can be their best selves and partner with talented individuals to build best-in-class cybersecurity solutions. This role leads the global Technical Excellence team and the global Escalations Engineering team, which are critical interfaces between Technical Support and the rest of the business. These teams provide early signals about product supportability and customer risk. The Senior Manager is responsible for translating expertise and findings into actionable change with Product and Engineering, and for ensuring a consistent escalations practice across all regions. This is a role focused on influence and orchestration, not direct management of a queue. The position sits within Operations & Scale and collaborates closely with the Sr. Director.

Requirements

8+ years in Technical Support, Escalation Management, or customer-facing engineering in enterprise software, with recent focus on security or vulnerability management.
3+ years managing technical teams, ideally senior individual contributors, technical leads, or escalation engineers.
Experience managing remote and globally distributed teams strongly preferred.
Hands-on experience running an escalation practice or program, including process design and cross-functional coordination.
Demonstrated ability to influence product and engineering priorities using support and escalation data.
Experience operating within Support–Engineering agreements, including SLA adherence for defect resolution.
Comfort with support metrics and the analysis behind them (escalation volume, re-escalation rate, time-to-resolution, ticket volume reduction) and the ability to build the evidence case for investment.
Strong understanding of Tenable's product portfolio and security best practices, or the demonstrated ability to reach it quickly.
Technical foundation across networking, authentication, operating systems, and cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) sufficient to lead technical discussions credibly.
Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable with senior stakeholders and with customers at any level.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
Able to work in a hybrid/on-site capacity at our office in Columbia MD or Boston MA.
Available to provide leadership coverage for critical escalations outside standard business hours as needed, and to work across AMER, EMEA, and APJ time zones to support globally distributed teams.
Occasional travel as required for team, customer, and cross-functional engagements.
Flexibility to perform other duties as deemed necessary by management.

Nice To Haves

Cybersecurity or adjacent enterprise security SaaS experience.
Prior time as a Technical Lead, Principal Engineer, or Escalations Engineer.
Product Management or program management exposure.
Familiarity with AI-assisted support workflows and their governance.
Experience supporting FedRAMP or other regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Run the operating model and product coverage plan for the global Technical Excellence team, ensuring clear ownership, defined authority, and no coverage gaps across theaters.
Set the team's working agenda, defining lead responsibilities, ownership, and time allocation between reactive escalation support and proactive supportability work.
Translate Technical Lead findings (defect patterns, supportability gaps, documentation failures, recurring friction) into a prioritized, evidence-backed agenda.
Position Technical Leads as credible partners in Product and Engineering forums, providing them with the data, framing, and support needed to influence.
Contribute to the Technical Lead career path and apply it consistently.
Own the global escalations practice day-to-day, including process design, entry/exit criteria, severity definitions, roles, communication standards, and adherence.
Drive the escalations practice to a single global standard, consistently applied and measured across all theaters.
Operate and enforce the working agreement with Product Engineering, covering SLA adherence for escalated defects, prioritization criteria, update cadence, and resolution commitments.
Escalate structural breakdowns to the Sr. Director.
Own the quality of post-escalation output, ensuring every RCA and post-incident report results in a tracked action.
Build the prevention agenda by analyzing root cause patterns and driving upstream product, process, tooling, or enablement changes to reduce escalation volume and re-escalation rate.
Act as the Technical Support point of contact for high-severity customer situations, providing assurance and coordination.
Represent Technical Support in roadmap, release readiness, and quality forums at the Product Management and Engineering Manager level, presenting the supportability and escalation-risk case with data.
Run the working-level feedback loop into Product and Engineering with defined cadence, shared prioritization, and visible tracking from support signal to shipped change.
Assemble evidence behind supportability investment (ticket volume, escalation cost, re-escalation overhead) and partner with the Sr. Director to create a business case for engineering capacity.
Partner with Engineering on release quality gates to ensure Technical Support has meaningful input before General Availability.
Represent both teams in cross-functional work with Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Professional Services.
Produce regular supportability and escalation readouts for the Sr. Director, including narrative, trends, and recommendations.
Present directly to senior leadership as requested.
Work with the Operations Manager to instrument escalation and Technical Lead activity in TSO reporting for visibility.
Lead and develop a senior, highly autonomous, globally distributed team.
Operate as a player-coach, holding the operating cadence, coaching the team, and stepping into critical escalations or Engineering conversations when necessary.
Build succession depth in both teams and eliminate single-person dependency on strategic products and accounts.
Partner with the Education & Enablement Manager to close skill gaps and feed field learnings into broader Technical Support enablement and certification.
Set goals, performance expectations, and measurement for both teams in line with global Technical Support objectives.
Drive AI adoption within Technical Lead and Escalations workflows under the Support AI governance framework.