Critical Situation Manager (Escalation Manager)

Skills this role screens for

About the role

The Escalation Manager is a critical role within Technical Services. As a member of our global Incident and Escalation Management team, they work internally with our Engineering, Services, Sales and Product Management teams, as well as externally with customers and partners, to coordinate and drive the resolution of critical technical issues and incidents. Transparency is key and is achieved by providing timely and accurate updates to senior management regarding active escalations, as well as important detail on the status of the customer account.

Individuals in this role are highly organized, proactive and professional. You are one who excels in fast-paced environments and can assess business impact, mobilize cross-functional teams, and drive technical escalations with urgency and ownership. We are looking for someone who has a customer-focused mindset with excellent communication and expectation-setting abilities. You have a technical background in Support, Services, DevOps, Systems Engineering, or Database environments, and are experienced in incident response or crisis management. You will have strong negotiation and objection-handling skills, along with the ability to deliver concise, actionable reporting for escalations and post-mortem reviews.

We are looking to speak to candidates who are based in Dublin for our hybrid working model.

Role summary

Critical Situation Management is the defining capability of this Escalation Manager role. You will lead MongoDB’s most complex and consequential customer situations, bringing calm, disciplined Incident Command to high-pressure events where technical ambiguity, business risk, and executive scrutiny converge.

You will establish command and control, mobilize the right cross-functional responders, and maintain a clear operating rhythm from situation declaration through mitigation, recovery, closure, and follow-through. At the same time, you will directly manage customer confidence and executive expectations, translating a fast-moving technical response into clear, accurate, decision-useful communication for customer and MongoDB leaders.

This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a technical-responder role. You must be technically fluent enough to understand impact, interrogate assumptions, and communicate the response credibly; the Technical Lead owns technical investigation and mitigation. The Critical Situation Manager/ Escalation Manager remains accountable for command and coordination when assigned as Incident Commander under the applicable operating model.

The work

What you’ll do

• Lead Critical Situation Management for the highest-complexity customer incidents and escalations, including major incidents and other customer situations requiring command-level coordination under established criteria.
• Take Incident Command when assigned: establish clear roles, decision rights, priorities, response cadence, action tracking, and escalation paths; maintain a shared view of customer impact, risks, workstreams, and recovery criteria.
• Bring order to ambiguity and pressure. Make timely coordination decisions with incomplete or changing information, surface blockers early, and keep the response focused on customer-impacting outcomes.
• Orchestrate Technical Services, Engineering, Product, Support, SRE/Cloud Operations, Customer Success, Sales, and other partners as needed. Keep technical investigation and mitigation with the designated technical owners while ensuring they have the resources, decisions, and space to make progress.
• Serve as a trusted point of contact for customer executives and senior leaders. Understand the sensitivity and business context behind their demands; acknowledge urgency, set realistic expectations, give clear next-update commitments, and distinguish confirmed facts from active investigation without overpromising.
• Tailor concise, consistent communications for technical teams, customer leadership, and MongoDB executives. Align closely with the Account Lead and communications support so customer context, business impact, and response messaging remain coherent.
• Maintain incident records, decision and action logs, timelines, handovers, and executive updates so responders and leaders can quickly understand the current state. Ensure command is explicitly transferred when needed, with no loss of context or accountability.
• Confirm that recovery and exit criteria are met, coordinate a controlled transition back to standard support, and drive timely, high-quality incident reviews, customer-facing reports, root-cause follow-up, and corrective actions.
• Identify account-level and systemic risks, and turn lessons from critical situations into durable improvements to process, tooling, documentation, readiness, and customer outcomes.
• Raise the operating standard across the function through mentoring, playbook improvement, and participation in scenario exercises and incident-readiness work.

Also

What success looks like

Working pattern

This role requires participation in a defined coverage model and may include occasional on-call responsibilities and/or shift work to support customer critical situations across time zones and outside standard business hours.

• Critical situations have a clearly identified commander, well-defined roles, a reliable operating rhythm, and accountable actions from declaration through closure.
• Technical workstreams stay focused and coordinated, with blockers and decisions surfaced early and effective handovers across teams and regions.
• Customer and MongoDB executives receive timely, accurate, empathetic updates that clarify impact, what is known, what is being done, and when they will hear from us again.
• The response restores or stabilizes the customer’s business as effectively as possible, while preserving trust and avoiding preventable surprises.
• Post-incident learning results in complete, useful customer and internal follow-up and measurable prevention or readiness improvements.

Also

What you’ll bring

• Typically 7–10+ years of experience managing highly technical customer escalations, major incidents, or critical situations in enterprise software, cloud services, SaaS, or a similarly complex technology environment.
• Deep, demonstrated experience in command and control under pressure - as an Incident Commander, Major Incident Manager, crisis leader, or in an equivalent role. You have led ambiguous, high-impact events with multiple teams and workstreams, and can describe the decisions and outcomes you owned.
• A strong track record of managing sensitive, high-stakes relationships with customer executives and senior internal leaders, including setting expectations, handling competing demands, and maintaining credibility when the facts or recovery timeline are uncertain.
• Strong technical fluency across databases or distributed systems, cloud platforms, and production environments. You can understand complex technical narratives, ask precise questions, assess business impact, and explain trade-offs without taking over the technical lead’s role.
• Excellent executive communication and situational judgment: you can turn complex, fast-changing information into concise, accurate updates and distinguish urgency from evidence.
• Proven ability to influence without direct authority, align cross-functional teams, unblock decisions, and sustain accountability through long-running or follow-the-sun situations.
• Experience with incident response practices, structured command frameworks, escalation paths, incident documentation, handovers, and post-incident reviews.
• The composure, resilience, and personal organization to manage several high-priority threads without losing clarity, empathy, or follow-through.

Nice to have

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in Technical Support, Technical Services, SRE/Operations, Customer Success, or incident and escalation management at a database, cloud, or distributed-systems company.…