Technical Support Escalation Director

Delinea•Redwood City, CA

About The Position

The Escalations Director (ED) is a senior, cross-functional leadership role created to manage and resolve customer escalations that have moved beyond technical troubleshooting into the realm of business and political risk. This person serves as the single point of accountability when a customer situation may become damaging to the customer relationship, the company's reputation, or a renewal or expansion opportunity. The Escalations Director operates with a high degree of autonomy and executive trust. While the role is an individual contributor position, the ED applies influence, credibility, and soft power to mobilize resources, align stakeholders, and drive resolution across organizational boundaries. The ED operates within established company processes and procedures wherever possible, escalating through appropriate channels rather than bypassing them.

Requirements

Significant experience in a customer-facing leadership role within a B2B cybersecurity or enterprise SaaS environment (typically 8+ years)
Demonstrated experience managing complex, high-stakes customer situations involving senior stakeholders on both sides
Familiarity with Privileged Access Management (PAM), Identity Security, or adjacent cybersecurity domains — sufficient to engage credibly with both technical teams and security-conscious customers
Proven ability to operate effectively under pressure and drive outcomes in ambiguous, fast-moving situations through influence rather than authority
Strong executive presence with the ability to command confidence in a room, whether with customers, peers, or company leadership
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to produce the right communication at the right time for the right audience; from a single-sentence text or email to a structured status update to a formal outage summary or executive briefing; the ED must be equally comfortable with all of these, often working from incomplete information and always under time pressure
Demonstrated success collaborating across multiple functions (Support, Professional Services, Customer Success, Product Management, Product Engineering, Renewals, and Sales)

Nice To Haves

Hands-on background in cybersecurity, identity management, or a related technical discipline
Experience building or formalizing escalation management processes from scratch
Familiarity with ITIL, CSAT/NPS frameworks, or other service quality methodologies

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary owner of designated politically sensitive customer escalations, regardless of the originating team (Support, Professional Services, Customer Success, Renewals, or Sales)
Validate and prioritize incoming escalation requests to confirm they meet the threshold for ED involvement
Maintain a real-time view of all active escalations, their status, owners, and risk levels
Lead external customer calls with professionalism, empathy, and authority, establishing confidence that the situation is being taken seriously at the highest level
Establish clear, agreed plans of action with the customer, including ownership, milestones, and timelines
Ensure all customer-facing communications are timely, accurate, and appropriately calibrated to the audience (from end-user through to C-suite)
Convene and chair internal escalation calls, requesting the appropriate mix of technical, operational, and leadership resources, up to and including executive leadership, as the situation demands
Recommend and help prioritize troubleshooting and remediation actions, working through and within established processes and procedures
Align cross-functional teams around a single, coherent plan of action, influencing and advocating rather than directing, and ensuring clarity of ownership across each workstream
Own the internal and external communication cadence throughout the lifecycle of an escalation
Provide regular, concise status updates to senior leadership on active escalations, risks, and progress
Produce post-escalation reviews documenting root cause, resolution timeline, lessons learned, and recommended process improvements
Identify patterns across escalations and work with relevant team leaders to address systemic issues upstream
Define, maintain, and continuously improve the escalation management framework, playbooks, and escalation criteria
Act as a culture carrier for customer-centricity and accountability across the organization
As the role matures, may take on people management responsibilities for a small, global escalations team