Technical Incident Manager, Tier 3

Description Summary

The Tier 3 Technical Incident Manager is responsible for coordinating and driving the end-to-end lifecycle of production incidents across Support, Technical Operations, Product, QA, Cloud/Infrastructure, and Engineering. This role acts as the traffic cop for escalated support cases ensuring that each incident is correctly classified, assigned to the right team, and progressed without delay.

Essential Duties

• Serve as the central point of coordination for all major incidents, ensuring incidents are triaged, classified, and routed to the correct area from Tier 3 (Product, Engineering, Cloud/Infrastructure, Security, etc.).
• Ensure clean and consistent handoffs between Operations Tier 2 to Tier 3 and beyond, validating that all required details, logs, steps, and impact statements are present.
• Monitor aging incidents and ensure cases do not stall due to lack of ownership or unclear responsibility.
• Engage appropriate technical teams quickly when escalation triggers are met.
• Ensure Tier 3 engineers are brought in for defect validation or deeper technical analysis when required.
• Participates in an on-call rotation for P1/P2 incident response and may be required to respond outside of standard business hours, including evenings, weekends, and holidays.
• Coordinate response to security-related incidents in partnership with the Security team, ensuring proper classification, containment actions, stakeholder notification, and evidence preservation consistent with SOC 2 and ISO compliance obligations.

Severity Assessment & Prioritization

• Validate and confirm incident severity levels (P1–P4) based on business impact, customer impact, and urgency.
• Cook with Tier Leads to ensure severity changes are communicated, documented, and acted on.
• Adjust priorities based on new information gathered from Tier teams or customer feedback.

Incident Command & Communication

• Act as the Incident Commander for P1/P2 events, driving timelines, identifying owners, and keeping the resolution effort focused.
• Coordinate real-time communication between Support, Engineering, Product, Cloud/Infrastructure, and leadership.
• Send timely incident updates to internal teams as appropriate.
• Maintain clear documentation of incident progress, decisions, and next steps.

Root Cause Analysis & Post-Incident Reviews

• Facilitate RCA sessions (Tier 3 performs the technical root cause work; Tier 3 Technical Incident Manager coordinates).
• Work with Tier 3 Support Engineers to ensure technical validation, reproduction results, and defect details are incorporated into RCA, documentation, and incident summaries.
• Ensure accurate timeline development, contributing factors, and improvements are captured.
• Track corrective actions with Engineering, Product, and Operations until closure.
• Identify patterns and recurring issues; partner with Tier Leads and Product for prevention.

Process & Operational Excellence

• Maintain and continuously improve the Incident Management framework, workflows, escalation paths, and communication templates.
• Ensure alignment with ITIL best practices.
• Drive operational readiness across Support tiers, including escalation triggers, communication templates, and runbooks.
• Identify breakdowns in process or handoff quality and recommend improvements.
• Coordinate with Engineering and Release Management on emergency change requests, hotfixes, and rollbacks during active incidents, ensuring change control processes are followed even under time pressure.

Metrics, Reporting & Insights

• Own MTTA, MTTR, incident frequency, recurrence metrics, and SLA compliance reporting.
• Provide weekly and monthly incident summaries to leadership.
• Identify gaps in detection, monitoring, or logging and drive improvements with Ops and Engineering.