Incident & Escalation Lead - Enterprise Customers

An Overview of This Role

Support Engineering at GitLab believes that healthy teams deliver a healthy customer experience, and that command during a crisis shouldn't fall to whoever happens to be senior and available. GitLab's global Incident & Escalation Management (IM/EM) function coordinates critical incidents, complex multi-team engagements, and executive-level escalations for enterprise customers.

As Escalation Manager, you'll own complex, executive, and commercial escalations where customer trust and the relationship are at stake, alongside or independently of a technical issue. In this functional role, you'll advocate for customers inside GitLab, coordinate teams toward resolution, and lead relationship repair after the event.

What You'll Do

• Own complex, executive, and commercial escalations end-to-end, as defined in GitLab's IM/EM engagement model.
• Advocate for customers internally and coordinate Engineering, Support, Product, Customer Success, and Sales toward resolution, tracking commitments and holding owning teams accountable to agreed dates and deliverables.
• Maintain a written, customer-facing resolution plan from engagement through confirmed resolution, updating it at each communication milestone.
• Coordinate with Incident Managers during concurrent technical incidents to maintain a single, coherent narrative for the customer.
• Own external escalation communications using GitLab's approved templates and cadence, representing GitLab in high-stakes customer conversations where clarity and ownership influence retention.
• Engage Sales, Customer Success, and executive stakeholders as needed, including executive-to-executive communication for Severity 1 and 2 events. Brief GitLab leadership with concise summaries distinguishing what's known, what's unknown, and next steps.
• Lead post-escalation reviews and relationship repair plans, contribute corrective actions with named owners and due dates to postmortems, and hand the relationship back to the account's Customer Success Manager at resolution.
• Partner with the Head of IM/EM to develop playbooks, communication templates, and process improvements based on patterns from escalations.

What You'll Bring

• Experience in enterprise technical support, customer success, or incident and escalation management at a B2B SaaS or enterprise software company.
• A track record of owning complex, multi-stakeholder escalations end-to-end, including executive customer engagements and structured resolution or account plans.
• Executive-level written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical detail into plain-language updates for customers and GitLab leadership.
• The ability to coordinate Engineering, Support, Product, Customer Success, and Sales under pressure without formal authority over those teams.
• Calm, structured decision-making with incomplete information and the ability to provide a steadying presence in high-stress customer situations.
• Proficiency with support and coordination tools such as Zendesk, Salesforce, Slack, and PagerDuty, or equivalent platforms.
• Availability for on-call coverage supporting executive escalations as part of a globally distributed team.

Nice to have:

• ITIL Foundation or equivalent certification.
• Customer-facing experience with GitLab, DevSecOps, CI/CD, or cloud-native products.
• Experience with formal escalation or incident command frameworks.
• Experience with AI-assisted support tools for triage, sentiment analysis, or resolution drafting.

About the Team

The Incident & Escalation Management function sits within Support Engineering in GitLab's Enterprise Technology & AI (ETA) division. We operate a follow-the-sun model anchored in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia-Pacific, providing year-round, 24-hour coverage for enterprise customers. Escalation Managers work globally rather than within a single region, partnering with Incident Managers, Communications Leads, and regional Support Engineering leadership to shape playbooks, templates, and standards as we scale.