Escalation Manager

Salesforce; Illinois; On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Salesforce, Inc. is seeking an Escalation Manager to act as incident commander for critical customer issues, coordinating across Support, Engineering, CSIRT, Sales, and Product teams. The role emphasizes prevention and learning from incidents to reduce customer impact.

You will build strong relationships with customers and internal teams, drive operation excellence, and manage incidents to meet targets for satisfaction and deadlines.

Qualifications

• Degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years in a technical support environment.
• 5+ years in support management, critical issue management, and incident response.
• Familiarity with incident management frameworks (ITIL, NIMS, NIST, SANS, etc.).
• Understanding of Salesforce product offerings is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own critical issues and Sev 1s across all clouds, driving to resolution with the appropriate teams.
• Represent Salesforce on customer bridges and engage customers to drive operational excellence.
• Manage incidents to meet targets for customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, service levels, resolution time, and project deadlines.
• Coordinate warm handoffs with other GEO and weekend escalation managers.
• Build trusted partnerships with Infrastructure, Engineering, Operations, Technical Support, Customer Success, Industry and Partners, and Sales Leadership.
• Lead retrospectives to identify process improvements and continuously improve service delivery.
• Deliver operational reports with qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance.

Skills

Incident command

Executive communication

Collaboration & influence

Project management

Ownership

Service mindset

Education

Degree or equivalent practical experience

Job description

Job Category

Program & Project Management

Job Details

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn't a buzzword - it's a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all.

Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You're in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce.

Role Overview

The Escalation Manager acts as incident commander for critical customer issues, engaging the right resources quickly. The role is hands-on and balances authoritative and collaborative modes depending on the situation.

You will build strong relationships with customers and with teams across Salesforce. These include Support for all cloud products, Engineering (Site Reliability, Customer Centric Engineering, Technology Communications, Readiness), CSIRT, Sales, Consulting, QA, Program Management, and Product Management.

The role has an operational focus on prevention. You will learn from cases and incidents and partner with other teams on initiatives that reduce or eliminate customer impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Own critical issues and Sev 1s across all clouds, and drive them to resolution with the appropriate teams.
• Represent Salesforce on customer bridges and engage customers to drive operational excellence.
• Manage incidents to meet targets for customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, service levels, resolution time, and project deadlines.
• Coordinate warm handoffs with other GEO and weekend escalation managers.
• Build trusted partnerships with Infrastructure, Engineering, Operations, Technical Support, Customer Success, Industry and Partners, and Sales Leadership to ensure company-wide alignment.
• Lead retrospectives to identify process improvements, and continuously improve service delivery.
• Deliver operational reports with qualitative and quantitative analysis of business performance.

Qualifications

• Degree or equivalent practical experience. We assess experience from any setting, such as work, military, volunteer, or leadership roles, based on the skills and behaviors this role requires.
• 7+ years in a technical support environment, handling highly sophisticated issues.
• 5+ years in support management, critical issue management, and incident response in a high-growth software or hardware technology organization.
• Strong cloud and infrastructure technology and delivery experience. Technical literacy is required, and deep knowledge of multi-tenant cloud systems and complex infrastructure is highly desirable.
• Experience managing customer concerns across multiple partners, including customers and product teams.
• Familiarity with incident management frameworks (ITIL, NIMS, NIST, SANS, etc.).
• Understanding of Salesforce product offerings is strongly preferred.

Core Skills & Competencies

• Incident command: Leads and prioritizes multiple critical issues at once, remotely and on customer bridges, with a high level of operational urgency.
• Executive communication: Exceptional C-level written and verbal skills. You tailor your message to the audience and explain technical issues to engineers and executives alike.
• Collaboration and influence: Builds productive relationships across the Critical Incident Center, partner organizations, and matrixed teams. You influence others to lead projects without formal authority.
• Project management and rigor: Strong operational discipline, with the ability to lead cross-functional work to results.
• Ownership: Self-motivated and takes initiative. You own outcomes, run programs with minimal direction, and elevate obstacles proactively.
• Service mindset: Customer-centric and focused on quality of service and continuous improvement.

What We're Looking For

• Thrives under pressure. You stay composed in fast-paced, high-stakes situations, de-escalate tension, and lead with clarity and authority.
• Thinks in root causes. You want to understand why an escalation happened and prevent the next one. You connect individual cases to team and organizational outcomes.
• Designs bespoke solutions. You apply creative problem-solving to non-standard situations while preserving trust and relationships.
• Builds trust in tough moments. You set clear expectations and communicate with empathy, professionalism, and respect, even when things get hard.
• Operates with urgency and autonomy. You make decisions quickly, commit organizational resources when needed, and keep moving through ambiguity and