Senior Manager - Incident Response Engineering

📋 Description

• • As the Senior Manager of Incident Response Engineering at Confluent Inc., you will be at the forefront of ensuring the reliability and resilience of a world-class data streaming platform that processes millions of events per second across major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• • This is a pivotal leadership role within the Cloud Architecture & Reliability (CAR) organization, responsible for establishing and executing a comprehensive incident response program.
• • You will lead a specialized team of approximately 5 senior incident response engineers, providing 24/7 coverage across global time zones, ensuring swift and effective resolution of critical customer-impacting incidents.
• • Your primary responsibility will be to act as a player-coach, providing direct incident command for high-severity events while simultaneously building the strategic framework for the entire incident response function.
• • This includes owning the people, processes, tooling, and overall outcomes of incident management, fostering a culture of rigor, intentionality, and continuous improvement.
• • You will be empowered to operate with conviction and autonomy, making critical decisions during major incidents, setting the pace, and directing the response efforts with clarity and composure.
• • Beyond active incident management, you will be instrumental in developing advanced practices, implementing cutting-edge tooling, and leveraging AI-driven capabilities to enhance the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of every response.
• • The ideal candidate views incident response not as mere firefighting, but as a critical engineering discipline that can be systematically improved through strategic leadership and meticulous execution.
• • You will be responsible for recruiting, hiring, and developing a high-performing team of senior technical operators, ensuring they possess deep systems intuition and the ability to navigate complex, ambiguous situations.
• • Designing and implementing sustainable on-call models, including follow-the-sun coverage, will be crucial to maintaining 24/7 operational readiness.
• • You will set and rigorously enforce standards for incident management, encompassing communication cadences, stakeholder engagement, coordination of domain experts, and seamless handoffs.
• • A paramount focus will be placed on maintaining a customer-first posture throughout every incident, guaranteeing timely, accurate updates and clear ownership from initial detection to final resolution.
• • You will own the end-to-end postmortem process, including facilitation, in-depth root cause analysis, definition of corrective actions, and ensuring their diligent follow-through.
• • A key deliverable is managing the Customer Root Cause Analysis (CRCA) program, producing technically accurate, clearly written documents that rebuild customer trust and provide valuable insights.
• • This involves coordinating critical technical inputs from various engineering teams and synthesizing complex, potentially ambiguous information into clear, actionable narratives.
• • You will champion an AI-centric approach to incident operations, utilizing intelligent tooling to accelerate triage, improve documentation quality, and enhance pattern detection without compromising the integrity of the response process.
• • Collaboration with other sub-functions within CAR, such as observability, supportability, and resiliency, will be essential to provide vital feedback for platform evolution.
• • You will own and continuously evolve the incident management tooling stack, prioritizing solutions that offer agentic assistance and streamline operations.
• • Analyzing incident data to identify recurring patterns and systemic issues will be a core activity, feeding these learnings back into engineering practices to prevent future occurrences.
• • When incident volume permits, you will strategically direct your team's capacity towards improving runbooks, developing automation, and enhancing overall operational hygiene.
• • You will serve as a key cross-functional liaison, partnering with Legal, Public Relations, and Customer Success teams to manage customer-facing communications during and after significant incidents.
• • You will be responsible for briefing engineering leadership and executives with clarity and composure during active incidents, providing concise and accurate situational updates.
• • This role positions you as the go-to expert for engineering teams seeking guidance on improving operational standards and incident response practices.
• • Ultimately, you will drive the evolution of Confluent's incident response capabilities, ensuring the platform remains robust, reliable, and trusted by its global customer base.