Incident and Escalation Manager

Vapi is a Voice AI platform that resolves, not transfers. Powering 1 billion calls for companies like Amazon Ring, Intuit, ServiceTitan, and New York Life. Trusted by 1 million developers. Backed by Peak XV, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, Y Combinator, and more with $72M raised.

• Define what counts as an incident and what does not, with entrance and exit criteria that protect engineering from noise.
• Author the severity model with response-time targets per level.
• Design how a live incident runs: command structure, update cadence, single source of truth, decision rights, and escalation paths.
• Build and train the incident commander rotation.
• Own the pager and work part of the rotation yourself.
• Stand up incident tooling and on-call setup: paging, escalation policies, incident channels, status page, and runbook library.
• Build customer communication templates for each severity and channel.
• Govern the customer credit process with a clear approval chain.
• Stand up metrics: resolution time, response velocity, escalation volume, RCA SLA adherence, and revenue protected.
• Build standing partnerships with engineering, support, office of the CTO, legal, security, comms, and carrier operations.
• Train go-to-market, support, customer success, and engineering on where to bring customer-critical issues.
• Build a feedback loop so incident and escalation data shapes the engineering roadmap.
• Own the customer-facing RCA and run blameless post-incident reviews.
• Close the loop with affected customers directly.
• Hold high-severity customer issues that do not rise to a full incident but threaten a renewal or relationship.
• Run the standing executive escalation list.
• Spot patterns across customers and force them into engineering or product as prioritized work.
• Be the single point of contact for regulated customers or regulatory inquiries.
• Partner with account teams on at-risk accounts driven by reliability.
• Keep a written handoff and a named deputy so escalations stay covered when you are out.

• 8 to 12 years across incident management, escalation management, technical support escalations, or technical program management, ideally at an infrastructure, telephony, or platform company operating at scale.
• A track record building an incident and escalation program from zero, or owning a meaningful piece of one through its growth, including standing up an incident commander rotation rather than being the sole responder. Experience hiring a team is a plus.
• Hands-on familiarity with incident tooling such as PagerDuty, incident.io, Opsgenie, or equivalent, and the Slack and status-page workflows around them.
• Calm under pressure as a learned discipline. Gravitas to direct a response and the willingness to remove a distraction from a call even when it outranks you.
• Decision-making with incomplete information, and the judgment to know when to escalate and how to do it without losing time.
• Clear writing under pressure. You can produce a clean read of a live situation for a senior leader, and a customer RCA that holds a relationship together.
• Comfort with technical depth. You do not need to write the fix, but you need to follow the conversation, ask the right question, and know when an answer does not add up. Familiarity with telephony, carrier dynamics, or real-time systems is a strong plus.
• Willingness to work part of the on-call rotation.