Incident Commander

About this role

Who we are

At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences.

Our dedication to remote-first work , and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands.

We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions!

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See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as Twilio’s next Incident Commander

About the job

This position is needed to help own and strategically evolve Twilio's incident response function as one of the company's most senior Incident Commanders, working alongside other senior ICs on the team. You will be capable of facilitating incidents across the full range of severities, including our highest-severity incidents. You will orchestrate response across a wide range of business functions, not just engineering. You'll be one of the senior voices VPs and C-suite leaders turn to for a clear, accurate read on what's happening and what's next. You approach every incident with genuine curiosity — pushing past the first plausible explanation to find what's really going on — and bring that same curiosity to the retrospective once the dust settles. Beyond the incident room, you'll help own the 12-month incident response process and tooling strategy for the company: setting company-wide response standards, defining response OKRs, and driving cross-org adoption of the practices that reduce MTTR and prevent recurrence. You mentor and uplift other Incident Commanders and teams across departments, actively working to remove yourself as a single point of failure. This position is part of a global team with a follow-the-sun model and requires working effectively with teams across multiple timezones and geo-locations.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• BE AN OWNER: Serve as Incident Commander across the full range of severities, including our most critical, cross-functional incidents. Orchestrate the incident process company-wide, own the accuracy of incident data, and set standards for how IR lifecycle milestones are met.

• NOT SETTLE: Enforce incident response practices at the Director and VP level and shape which industry best practices Twilio adopts. Identify cross-org gaps and push product groups to prioritize fixes that delay MTTR or block the IR lifecycle. Run multiple concurrent workstreams — deviating from standard process when needed, even across simultaneous incidents.

• WRITE IT DOWN: Keep VPs and C-level stakeholders informed with clear, timely updates during critical incidents. Own key Incident Command documentation and keep it current through change management. Drive quality and accuracy in incident data company-wide.

• EMPOWER OTHERS: Mentor and train Incident Commanders and engineering teams, with the goal of removing yourself as a single point of failure. Peer-review other ICs' work and surface trends that drive company-wide improvement. Bring genuine curiosity to every incident — asking "why" past the first plausible answer — and carry that same curiosity into Post Incident Review, helping Incident Owners surface real contributing factors and repair items.

• WEAR THE CUSTOMER’S SHOES: Help Product Managers deliver high-quality Reason For Outage documents within SLO, and drive Product Groups to meet their incident response SLAs/SLOs. Escalate customer issues to the right people, during and after an incident.

• DRAW THE OWL: Own the 1-3 year strategic vision for incident response process and tooling. Lead cross-org projects end-to-end with Product Group leadership and Program Managers. Influence C-level and VP leaders on IR direction, define company-wide standards, and set Response OKRs. Evaluate new tools and technology, and represent Twilio externally as a thought leader in incident response.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

Required:

• 8+ years leading high-severity incident response, including as incident commander for the most critical incidents at a company operating at meaningful scale.

• Track record of driving company-wide incident response strategy and standards, including setting OKRs and leading multi-team, multi-region adoption over a 1-3 year horizon.

• Proven ability to influence and enforce practices at the Director/VP/C-suite level without formal authority; comfortable being the calm, authoritative voice in the room regardless of who's in it.

• Experience partnering across functions beyond engineering (e.g. Security, Support, Product) during incident response.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with experience conveying incident status and risk clearly to executives and customer-facing teams.

• Ability to size up a situation and make rapid decisions on the right course of action, including across multiple concurrent incidents.

• Experience mentoring and upleveling other incident commanders, aimed at raising all boats within a response organization.

• Deep understanding of the incident response lifecycle (Gameday, Incident Response, PIR, Betterments), including defining or refining it for an organization.

• Ability to lead cross-org projects end-to-end: defining milestones, managing risk, and driving them through formal change management

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