Incident Commander

This position is needed to help own and strategically evolve Twilio's incident response function as one of the company's most senior Incident Commanders, working alongside other senior ICs on the team. 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. You'll be one of the senior voices VPs and C-suite leaders turn to 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 room, you'll help own the 12-month incident response process and tooling strategy for the company: setting company-wide response standards, defining response OKRs, and driving cross-org adoption of the practices that reduce MTTR and prevent recurrence. You mentor and uplift other Incident Commanders and teams across departments, actively working to remove yourself as a single point of failure. 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.

• 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 the Director and VP level 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 VPs and C-level stakeholders informed with clear, timely updates during critical incidents.
• Own key Incident Command documentation and keep it current through change management.
• Drive quality and accuracy in incident data company-wide.
• Mentor and train Incident Commanders and engineering teams, with the goal of removing yourself as a single point of failure.
• Peer-review other ICs' work and surface trends that drive company-wide improvement.
• Bring genuine curiosity to every incident — asking 'why' past the first plausible answer — and 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 SLAs/SLOs.
• Escalate customer issues to the right people, during and after an incident.
• Own the 1-3 year strategic vision for incident response process and tooling.
• Lead cross-org projects end-to-end with Product Group leadership and Program Managers.
• Influence C-level and VP leaders on IR direction, define company-wide standards, and set Response OKRs.
• Evaluate new tools and technology, and represent Twilio externally as a thought leader in incident response.

• 8+ years leading high-severity incident response, including as incident commander for the most critical incidents at a company operating at meaningful scale.
• Track record of driving company-wide incident response strategy and standards, including setting OKRs and leading multi-team, multi-region adoption over a 1-3 year horizon.
• Proven ability to influence and enforce 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.
• Experience mentoring and upleveling other incident commanders, aimed at raising all boats within a response organization.
• 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 retrospective, to find what's actually going on.