Incident Manager

Workday Limited; Auckland; Hybrid; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Workday, Inc. in Auckland, NZ, is seeking an experienced Incident Manager to coordinate responses to major incidents affecting Workday customers. You will lead cross‑functional teams across engineering, support, and business units to restore services quickly and implement preventive improvements.

The role operates within a global 24/7 environment, offering flexible work arrangements. You will analyze trends, drive runbook improvements, and communicate clearly with stakeholders while focusing on

Qualifications

• 5+ years of related experience in incident management, customer escalations, technical operations, or technical support.
• Experience leading major production incidents as an incident commander, coordinating technical teams and managing escalations through service restoration.
• Experience applying IT service management practices, such as ITIL, to incident response and problem management.

Responsibilities

• Lead major incident response, coordinating responders, clarifying responsibilities, managing escalations, and keeping customer recovery at the center of decisions.
• Provide timely, concise updates to Support teams, engineering partners, and senior leadership.
• Clearly communicate customer impact, recovery progress, risks, and uncertainty.
• Partner with service teams to identify detection gaps and improve actionable alerts, health checks, and other signals that help identify issues before customers report them.
• Improve response readiness through clearer runbooks, service context, change visibility, and initial mitigation steps.
• Facilitate blameless root cause analysis and post‑incident reviews.
• Help teams define meaningful corrective actions, establish ownership, and follow through on progress.
• Analyze incident trends, mean time to detect (MTTD), and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Use findings to recommend and measure improvements that reduce customer disruption.
• Simplify incident workflows and identify opportunities to automate communications, reporting, and repetitive tasks.
• Share lessons across teams and build partnerships that make resilience part of everyday service ownership.

Skills

Incident management

ITIL

Stakeholder communication

Crisis coordination

Job description

Your work days are brighter here. We’re obsessed with making hard work pay off, for our people, our customers, and the world around us. As a Fortune 500 company and a leading AI platform for managing people, money, and agents, we’re shaping the future of work so teams can reach their potential and focus on what matters most. The minute you join, you’ll feel it. Not just in the products we build, but in how we show up for each other. Our culture is rooted in integrity, empathy, and shared enthusiasm. We’re in this together, tackling big challenges with bold ideas and genuine care. We look for curious minds and courageous collaborators who bring sun-drenched optimism and drive. Whether you're building smarter solutions, supporting customers, or creating a space where everyone belongs, you’ll do meaningful work with Workmates who’ve got your back. In return, we’ll give you the trust to take risks, the tools to grow, the skills to develop and the support of a company invested in you for the long haul. So, if you want to inspire a brighter work day for everyone, including yourself, you’ve found a match in Workday, and we hope to be a match for you too.

About the Team

Every feature, product launch, and customer commitment depends on reliable services. The Incident Management & Prevention team helps protect that foundation at Workday. As part of the Incident Management and Service Engineering org, we bring people together to restore disrupted services, learn from incidents, and prevent them from happening again. Our global, 24/7 operations connect immediate customer needs with lasting improvements in reliability. In the year ahead, we’re partnering across Product and Technology to make resilience a shared responsibility, detect issues earlier, and reduce the time it takes to restore service. We are customer‑centric, calm under pressure, and committed to making things better. We show up for customers and each other when things go wrong, collaborate without blame, and turn difficult experiences into opportunities to learn. For us, success means more than managing today’s incident well—it means helping Workday become better prepared for the next one.

About the Role

As an Incident Manager, you will coordinate the response to major incidents affecting Workday customers. You’ll bring together the right engineering, support, and business teams, establish clear priorities, and guide the response toward safe, timely service restoration. Working within a global team that operates around the clock, you’ll gain broad exposure to Workday’s services and architecture, including on-premise and cloud‑based environments. Your impact will extend beyond recovery: you’ll help turn incident findings into practical changes that improve detection, simplify response, and reduce recurrence.

Responsibilities

• Lead major incident response, coordinating responders, clarifying responsibilities, managing escalations, and keeping customer recovery at the center of decisions.
• Provide timely, concise updates to Support teams, engineering partners, and senior leadership.
• Clearly communicate customer impact, recovery progress, risks, and uncertainty.
• Partner with service teams to identify detection gaps and improve actionable alerts, health checks, and other signals that help identify issues before customers report them.
• Improve response readiness through clearer runbooks, service context, change visibility, and initial mitigation steps.
• Facilitate blameless root cause analysis and post‑incident reviews.
• Help teams define meaningful corrective actions, establish ownership, and follow through on progress.
• Analyze incident trends, mean time to detect (MTTD), and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Use findings to recommend and measure improvements that reduce customer disruption.
• Simplify incident workflows and identify opportunities to automate communications, reporting, and repetitive tasks.
• Share lessons across teams and build partnerships that make resilience part of everyday service ownership.

About You

You bring structure to uncertain situations and help people work together when the pressure is high. You combine technical judgment with clear communication, ask thoughtful questions, and keep customer needs in focus. You care equally about restoring service today and improving resilience for tomorrow.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of related experience in incident management, customer escalations, technical operations, or technical support.
• Experience leading major production incidents as an incident commander, coordinating technical teams and managing escalations through service restoration.
• Experience applying IT service management practices, such as ITIL, to incident response and problem management.

Other Qualifications

• Major incident management and incident command: Experience establishing priorities, assigning response activities, and making timely decisions with incomplete information. You provide calm direction while adapting as new information becomes available.
• Technical analysis and troubleshooting: Ability to interpret technical details, recognize service dependencies, ask effective diagnostic questions, and test assumptions with engineering teams. You can guide recovery without needing to implement every fix yourself.
• Stakeholder and crisis communication: Experience translating complex technical situations into clear written and verbal updates for different audiences. You distinguish confirmed facts from uncertainty and explain impact, progress, and decisions needed.
• Cross‑functional collaboration and influence: Ability to bring teams together without direct authority, navigate competing priorities, and constructively address delays. You encourage shared accountability and keep the focus on recovery rather than blame.
• Problem management and systemic prevention: Experience facilitating blameless investigations, separating symptoms from underlying causes, and evaluating whether corrective actions will prevent recurrence or improve detection and recovery.
• Data‑driven continuous improvement: Ability to interpret incident trends and response metrics, identify bottlenecks, and turn findings into measurable improvements. You recognize opportunities to improve data quality, simplify processes, and reduce manual work through automation.

Our Approach to Flexible Work

With Flex Work, we’re combining the best of both worlds: in-person time and remote. Our approach enables our teams to deepen connections, maintain a strong community, and do their best work. We know that flexibility can take shape in many ways, so rather than a number of required days in‑office each week, we simply spend at least half (50%) of our time each quarter in the office or in the field with our customers, prospects, and partners (depending on role). This means you’ll have the freedom to create a flexible schedule that caters to your business, team, and personal needs, while being intentional to make the most of time spent together. Those in our remote "home office" roles also have the opportunity to come together in our offices for important moments that matter.

Acccommodations

Workday is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals during our application process, in order to perform one or more essential functions of their job, as well as regarding the use of AI tools for employment decision‑making to any degree. We do not accept resumes from headhunters, placement agencies, or other suppliers that have not signed a formal agreement with us. Workday will never ask candidates to pay a recruiting fee or to pay for consulting or coaching services to apply for a job at Workday.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Workday is proud to be an equal‑opportunity workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Workday are considered without regards to age, ancestry, color, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, mental or physical disability, national origin, protected family care or medical leave status, race, religion (including beliefs and practices or the absence thereof), sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. Further, pursuant to applicable local ordinances, Workday will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Note Regarding Pay Transparency

We provide Pay Transparency information and know your rights notice accessible upon request.

Workday will never ask candidates to provide a reference or to contact a reference outside of the application process. We encourage a premise of privacy and data security when applying for roles at Workday. Any employee who retaliates against a candidate or employee for doing so may be subject to disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment to the fullest extent allowable under applicable law.

We remain committed to ensuring a respectful, inclusive, and lawful application process.