R&D Escalation Manager

Employment: Full-time Experience level: Mid-Senior Level Job Description   Own escalation outcomes end to end - proactively drive every escalated ticket to closure with the owning team (chase R&D, unblock stalls, guarantee SLA coverage), with no orphan issues. Own the definitions, not just the tracking - define and periodically re-baseline escalation SLAs, severity criteria, and quality standards, and decide them independently rather than escalating the decision upward. Lead ad-hoc task forces for critical and urgent production incidents, and ensure every severe incident produces a real post-mortem with action items that are tracked and actually closed. Own escalation metrics and dashboards, enforce data quality, and use the escalation vantage point to spot recurring patterns and drive systemic fixes with R&D - not per-ticket firefighting. Scale the escalation function without scaling headcount by making AI and automation the default: AI-assisted triage and routing, AIOps and auto-remediation to bring MTTR down, and continuous elimination of repetitive toil.      Qualifications     Experience in software development and/or technical support, with genuine ownership of escalation and incident management. Demonstrated ability to lead investigations and full root-cause analysis, owning them through to the end. Bias to independent decision-making - comfortable setting priorities, SLAs, and quality bars without waiting to be handed the answer. System-level thinking - turns individual incidents into process and product improvements. Assertive and driven, comfortable pushing senior developers and managers when tickets stall; proven record leading cross-functional / matrix-managed teams (no direct reports). It would be great if you also have: Hands-on experience with incident response and troubleshooting in production, ideally in networking / cloud infrastructure environments. Familiarity with observability and monitoring tooling (Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty). Comfort using automation and AI tooling to streamline operational work - scripting, agents, AIOps / LLM-based automation. Understanding of SASE / VPN / network fundamentals. #LI-NK2 Company Description We are looking for an R&D Escalation Manager to join our Harmony SASE R&D group and own the bridge between Customer Support and R&D - making sure our toughest production and customer issues reach the right team and get driven to resolution fast. This role owns the escalation system, not the escalation inbox: it is built for a driver, not a router. This is an individual-contributor role - a matrix lead who drives a cross-functional squad, with no direct reports.