Incident Commander

Who we are

At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences.

Our dedication to remote-first work, and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands.

We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions!

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as Twilio’s next Incident Commander

About the job

This position is needed to help own and strategically evolve Twilio's incident response function as one of the company's Incident Commanders. You will be capable of facilitating incidents across the full range of severities, including our highest-severity incidents. You will orchestrate response across a wide range of business functions, not just engineering. VPs, C-suite leaders, Triage Engineers, Incident Owners, and customer facing teams will turn to you for a clear, accurate read on what's happening and what's next. You approach every incident with genuine curiosity, pushing past the first plausible explanation to find what's really going on, and bring that same curiosity to the retrospective once the dust settles. Beyond the incident bridge, you will own and influence the incident response process and tooling strategy for the company. Helping set company-wide response standards, defining response OKRs, and driving cross-org adoption of the practices that reduce MTTR and prevent recurrence. This position is part of a global team with a follow-the-sun model and requires working effectively with teams across multiple timezones and geo-locations.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• Serve as Incident Commander across the full range of severities, including our most critical, cross-functional incidents. Orchestrate the incident process company-wide, own the accuracy of incident data, and set standards for how IR lifecycle milestones are met.
• Enforce incident response practices at all levels and shape which industry best practices Twilio adopts. Identify cross-org gaps and push product groups to prioritize fixes that delay MTTR or block the IR lifecycle. Run multiple concurrent workstreams, deviating from standard process when needed, even across simultaneous incidents.
• Keep stakeholders informed with clear, timely updates during critical incidents as well as project development. Own key Incident Command documentation and keep it current through change management. Drive quality and accuracy in incident data company-wide.
• Bring genuine curiosity to every incident, while maintaining focus on incident mitigation and customer communications. Carry that same curiosity into Post Incident Review, helping Incident Owners surface real contributing factors and repair items.
• Help Product Managers deliver high-quality Reason For Outage documents within SLO, and drive Product Groups to meet their incident response SLOs. Escalate customer issues to the right people, during and after an incident.
• Lead cross-org projects end-to-end with Product Group leadership and Program Managers. Influence company-wide standards. Evaluate new tools and technology, and represent Twilio externally as a thought leader in incident response.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

Required:

• 5+ years leading high-severity incident response, including as incident commander for the most critical incidents at a company operating at meaningful scale.
• Proven ability to influence and enforce incident practices at the Director/VP/C-suite level without formal authority; comfortable being the calm, authoritative voice in the room regardless of who's in it.
• Experience partnering across functions beyond engineering (e.g. Security, Support, Product) during incident response.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with experience conveying incident status and risk clearly to executives and customer-facing teams.
• Ability to size up a situation and make rapid decisions on the right course of action, including across multiple concurrent incidents.
• Deep understanding of the incident response lifecycle (Gameday, Incident Response, PIR, Betterments), including defining or refining it for an organization.
• Ability to lead cross-org projects end-to-end: defining milestones, managing risk, and driving them through formal change management.
• A curious, investigative mindset, asking "why" past the first plausible answer, both live during an incident and in Post Incident Review, to find what's actually going on.

Desired:

• Understanding of modern engineering tech stack and tooling.
• Experience with Twilio products and services.
• Certification(s) in Incident Management (CEIM), Security Incident Management (CSIRT), program management/project management, Six Sigma, Scrum, or similar.

Location

This role will be remote and based in Ireland.

Travel

For this role, you may be offered to travel to participate in project meetings, however travel opportunities are minimal.

What we offer

Working at Twilio offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.