Job Description
Love leading under pressure and turning chaos into clarity? Zendesk is looking for an Incident Response Lead who thrives in the heat of an outage—someone who can triage quickly, swarm the right people, and restore service while keeping stakeholders informed. This role is critical to our hybrid SRE model, driving incident swarming, restoration, and blameless post-incident reviews across our 70+ CIO-owned applications.
The Role:
The Incident Response Lead will own the incident management and response capability for Zendesk’s internal IT services. You will lead incident triage and restoration, coordinate incident swarming with domain teams and SREs, and facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) that drive learning and prevention. As Incident Commander, you will be the single point of coordination during major outages—ensuring clear communication, dynamic team assembly, and rapid restoration across Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ, EISS, and other critical SaaS applications.
This is a hands-on leadership role that combines technical triage, process ownership, and calm coordination under pressure. You will partner closely with Observability, Problem Management, and Change Management to reduce MTTR and improve reliability.
What You Will Do:
- Lead incident triage and restoration—declare incidents, assess severity, and coordinate response across resolver teams.
- Drive incident swarming—assemble dynamic response teams; coordinate with domain owners, platform teams, and vendors to restore service.
- Serve as Incident Commander for major (Sev 0–2) IT incidents; own communication cadence and status updates to stakeholders.
- Facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) and blameless postmortems; ensure action items are captured and handed off to Problem Management.
- Partner with Observability & Monitoring to improve detection, alert hygiene, and incident creation from monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog).
- Maintain incident runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call rotation standards for the Incident Response Squad.
- Collaborate with Service Desk and Global Service Desk on intake, routing, and escalation criteria (e.g., >5 tickets/hour triggers).
- Champion the hybrid SRE incident model—swarming with ITSM tracking, aligned severity definitions, and unified tooling (Incident.I/O).
- Contribute to continuous improvement: reduce MTTR, improve time-to-detect, and strengthen incident response maturity.
What You Bring:
- Required: 5+ years of experience in Incident Management, SRE, NOC, or IT Operations roles.
- Preferred: Experience in a global, high-growth tech company with SaaS applications.
- Strong working knowledge of ITIL Incident Management and practical experience with incident swarming or war-room coordination.
- Experience leading high-severity incident response; calm under pressure; able to synthesize technical details into clear status updates.
- Familiarity with incident tools (e.g., Incident.I/O, PagerDuty, Revere) and collaboration channels (Slack, Zoom).
- Understanding of SaaS applications, integrations (Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ), and common failure modes.
- Excellent communication and facilitation skills—able to coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Exposure to observability, monitoring, or alerting (Datadog, Prometheus, etc.).
- Understanding of severity models, escalation paths, and post-incident review best practices.
Nice to Have:
- ITIL 4 Foundation or Incident Management certification
- Experience with automation/scripting (Python, PowerShell) for runbooks or incident enrichment
- Knowledge of SRE principles, error budgets, and blameless postmortem culture
- Previous experience at a SaaS company or in a customer support tech stack environment
How We Will Measure Success:
- Reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD).
- Timely completion of PIRs and handoff of action items to Problem Management.
- Improved incident response coordination and stakeholder satisfaction during outages.
- Adoption of incident swarming and hybrid SRE incident practices.
- Demonstrated integration with Observability and Problem Management for end-to-end reliability.
About Zendesk
Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. It empowers organizations to improve customer engagement and better understand their customers. Zendesk products are easy to use and implement. They give organizations the flexibility to move quickly, focus on innovation, and scale with their growth.
More than 100,000 paid customer accounts in over 150 countries and territories use Zendesk products. Based in San Francisco, Zendesk has operations in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America.
Interested in knowing what we do in the community? Check out the Zendesk Neighbor Foundation to learn more about how we engage with, and provide support to, our local communities.
Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
By submitting your application, you agree that Zendesk may collect your personal data for recruiting, global organization planning, and related purposes. Zendesk's Candidate Privacy Notice explains what personal information Zendesk may process, where Zendesk may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over Zendesk’s use of your personal information.
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The Poland annualized base salary range for this position is zł171,000.00-zł257,000.00. Please note that while the salary range represents the minimum and maximum base salary rate for this position, the actual compensation offered will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other relevant factors. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives that will be communicated during the offer stage.
Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.
The intelligent heart of customer experience
Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.
Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.
As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.
Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.
Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.