Senior Incident Commander

Box; Redwood City (CA); Hybrid; USD 187,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Office presence 3 days/week

Job summary

Box is seeking a Senior Incident Commander to lead critical incidents and drive rapid resolution. You will design and implement tooling to improve observability, automation, and resiliency across Box's cloud services, guiding cross‑functional teams in high‑severity situations and improving operational practices.

You will mentor teams, manage incident bridges, and shape reliable, scalable workflows, with a strong emphasis on automation, SRE fundamentals, and collaboration across product and

Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE, production operations, reliability engineering, or equivalent high‑scale internet/SaaS operations with repeated experience leading or co‑leading major production incidents.
• Proficient in Python for automation and tooling (readable code, APIs, packaging or service‑style tools).
• Solid Linux/Unix troubleshooting; comfortable with multi‑tier distributed systems (app, data, network, cloud).
• Experience with cloud environments (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure also valued) and container/orchestration concepts (Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Excellent written and verbal communication; able to guide and document under stress.
• Proven ability to coach and uplift others – training, mentoring, runbook quality.

Responsibilities

• Own and direct live‑site Critical and Blocker incidents from identification through recovery.
• Organize incident bridges, coordinate SME resources, and lead cross‑functional incident response.
• Improve incident tooling, automate repetitive steps, and reduce operational overhead.
• Collaborate with SRE and engineering teams to close operability gaps and secure automated workflows.
• Lead daily change reviews in Jira to evaluate and minimize risk.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical expertise for global, 24x7 environments.
• Lead projects to improve tools and processes for resiliency and observability.
• Represent GTOC/NOC in problem management and readiness reviews.
• Turn incident learnings into engineering asks to reduce customer impact.
• Leverage observability APIs, PagerDuty/Jira, and internal services for measurable workflows.
• Mentor and uplift the team through drills and runbooks.

Skills

SRE experience

Python automation

Incident management

Linux/Unix troubleshooting

Cloud and Kubernetes

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Prometheus/observability tools

Grafana

PagerDuty

Jira

Job description

WHAT IS BOX?

Box (NYSE:BOX) is the leader in Intelligent Content Management. Our platform enables organizations to fuel collaboration, manage the entire content lifecycle, secure critical content, and transform business workflows with enterprise AI. We help companies thrive in the new AI‑first era of business. Founded in 2005, Box simplifies work for leading global organizations, including JLL, Morgan Stanley, and Nationwide. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

By joining Box, you will have the unique opportunity to continue driving our platform forward. Content powers how we work. It's the billions of files and information flowing across teams, departments, and key business processes every single day: contracts, invoices, employee records, financials, product specs, marketing assets, and more. Our mission is to bring intelligence to the world of content management and empower our customers to completely transform workflows across their organizations. With the combination of AI and enterprise content, the opportunity has never been greater to transform how the world works together and at Box you will be on the front lines of this massive shift.

At Box, we believe unique and diverse experiences benefit our culture, our products, our customers, our company, and our world. We aim to recruit a passionate, high‑performing workforce that reflects the world we live in.If you are head‑over‑heels about this role but unsure if you meet all the requirements, we encourage you to apply!

WHY BOX NEEDS YO

Box is looking for a Senior Incident Commander with a strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) skillset and proficient Python for tooling and automation. The GTOC (Global Technical Operations Center) team protects the customer experience, and responsible for detecting customer‑impacting failures early, drive rapid mitigation when they occur, coordinate production change risk, and continuously improve how Box runs incidents.

In this role, you will be leading critical and blocker incidents and driving them to swift resolution, while leveraging your software engineering expertise to design and build the tools, automation, and processes that define the next generation of cloud operations. You will shape how we improve manageability, observability, and resiliency of our most critical services, and drive down MTTx so that when incidents happen, we respond faster and smarter than ever before.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own and direct live‑site Critical and Blocker (and other high severity) incidents from identification and escalation through mitigation and recovery.
• Triage, refine, and verify the problem and customer‑impact statements. Organize the incident bridge, establish clear swim lanes, coordinate SME's resources, and lead cross‑functional Incident Bridges to mitigate issues and restore service quickly.
• Improve Incident Platform tooling - Optimize templates, automate repetitive response steps, and develop tooling to reduce operational overhead and time to mitigate.
• Partner with SRE and engineering teams to deepen shared knowledge of Box's dependencies, Tier 1 journeys, failure modes. Work together to implement secure, automated workflows that close operability gaps.
• Lead daily change reviews of planned changes in Jira, partnering collaboratively with engineering teams to evaluate and minimize change risk.
• Provide day to day technical expertise and experience to the organization to address issues in globally diverse, 24x7 environments - influencing from policy and procedural decisions to key architectural and tooling insights to improve Box's Incident, Change, and Problem Management engineering capabilities.
• Lead projects to improve tools and processes related that enhance overall site resiliency, service manageability and observability.
• Represent GTOC/NOC in problem management, readiness reviews, and reliability in cross functional forums.
• Turn incident learnings into actionable engineering asks (such as SLOs, signal quality, rollback readiness, dependency docs) to reduce customer impact.
• Leverage observability APIs, PagerDuty/Jira, and internal services to make response workflows measurable and repeatable.
• Continuously mentor and uplift the team by running tabletop exercises and improving runbooks.

WHO YOU ARE

We are an AI‑first company. This means you approach your work with a growth mindset and find ways to leverage AI to help make faster, smarter decisions that will 10X your impact at Box.

• 5+ years in SRE, production operations, reliability engineering, or equivalent high‑scale internet/SaaS operations with repeated experience leading or co‑leading major production incidents.
• Demonstrated Incident Commander / Technical Duty Officer (or equivalent) skill: calm under uncertainty, clear communication, ability to delegate, and judgment on when to elevate vs. when to dig deeper.
• Strong SRE fundamentals: SLIs/SLOs and error budgets (practical use), observability (metrics, logs, traces), golden signals, blameless postmortems, toil reduction, and "you build it, you run it" partnership with product teams.
• Proficient in Python for automation and tooling (not just one‑off scripts): readable code, APIs, packaging or service‑style tools others can run, and comfort reviewing others' automation.
• Solid Linux/Unix troubleshooting; comfort in multi‑tier distributed systems (app, data, network, cloud).
• Networking literacy sufficient for real incidents (DNS, TLS, load balancing, HTTP, basic routing/firewall concepts).
• Experience with cloud environments (GCP preferred; AWS/Azure also valued) and container/orchestration concepts (Kubernetes or equivalent).
• Excellent written and verbal communication: exec‑ready impact statements, precise Slack/bridge facilitation, and documentation that others can trust under stress.
• Proven ability to coach and uplift others - training, mentoring, runbook quality, drills.

Preferred skills

• Experience in a 24x7 NOC / GTOC / follow-the‑sun operations center, or partnering closely with one.
• Hands‑on with Prometheus‑compatible observability (e.g. Chronosphere, Grafana), distributed tracing(e.g. SignalFx), synthetic monitoring (e.g. Catchpoint), and PagerDuty (or similar).
• Experience improving incident tooling (ChatOps, workflow automation, status/comms templates, drill frameworks).
• Familiarity with change management under pressure (emergency changes, break‑glass, CAB/async approval patterns).
• Additional languages or tooling useful for ops automation (Go, shell, Terraform, CI/CD).
• Prior work mapping dependency graphs, service catalogs, or Tier 1 journey documentation.

Box lives its values, with community and in‑person collaboration being a core part of our culture. Boxers are expected to work from their assigned office a minimum of 3 days per week.

At Box, we believe unique and diverse experiences benefit our culture, our products, our customers, our company, and our world. We aim to recruit a passionate, high‑performing workforce that reflects the world we live in.If you are head‑over‑heels about this role but unsure if you meet all the requirements, we encourage you to apply!

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability, and any other protected ground of discrimination under applicable human rights legislation. Box strives to respect the dignity and independence of people with disabilities and is committed to giving them the same opportunity to succeed as all other employees. Inclusiveness is core to our culture at Box, and we strive to ensure you get the most from your interview experience.

Box makes reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. If a reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, please complete this form. Reasonable accommodations may include scheduling adjustments, document dictation and beyond.

Notice to applicants in Los Angeles: Box, Inc and its related branches will consider for employment, qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the Los Angeles Fair Chair Ordinance. The Fair Chance Ordinance is provided here.

Notice to applicants in San Francisco: Box, Inc and its related branches will consider for employment, qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chair Ordinance. The Fair Chance Ordinance is provided here.

For details on how we protect your information when you apply, please see our Personnel Privacy Notice. If you are a California‑resident, please read our California Applicant & Candidate Privacy Notice here.

NOTICE OF USE OF AI

At Box, we believe in the power of AI to improve the recruiting process while keeping people at the heart of every decision. For more information on the use of AI in our hiring process, please visit our webpage here.

Box is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. Actual base salary (or OTE if commissionable role) is dependent upon factors such as: knowledge, skill level, experience, and work location. This role is also eligible for equity and benefits. For more information, check out our benefits and perks.

In accordance with OFCCP compliance, here is the Pay Transparency Provision.

Redwood City Pay Range

$187,000—$233,500 USD