R&D Escalation Manager

We are looking for an R&D Escalation Manager to join our Harmony SASE R&D group and own the bridge between Customer Support and R&D - making sure our toughest production and customer issues reach the right team and get driven to resolution fast. This role owns the escalation system, not the escalation inbox: it is built for a driver, not a router. This is an individual-contributor role - a matrix lead who drives a cross-functional squad, with no direct reports.

Major Responsibilities

• Own escalation outcomes end to end - proactively drive every escalated ticket to closure with the owning team (chase R&D, unblock stalls, guarantee SLA coverage), with no orphan issues.
• Own the definitions, not just the tracking - define and periodically re-baseline escalation SLAs, severity criteria, and quality standards, and decide them independently rather than escalating the decision upward.
• Lead ad-hoc task forces for critical and urgent production incidents, and ensure every severe incident produces a real post-mortem with action items that are tracked and actually closed.
• Own escalation metrics and dashboards, enforce data quality, and use the escalation vantage point to spot recurring patterns and drive systemic fixes with R&D - not per-ticket firefighting.
• Scale the escalation function without scaling headcount by making AI and automation the default: AI-assisted triage and routing, AIOps and auto-remediation to bring MTTR down, and continuous elimination of repetitive toil.

Desired Background

• Experience in software development and/or technical support, with genuine ownership of escalation and incident management.
• Demonstrated ability to lead investigations and full root-cause analysis, owning them through to the end.
• Bias to independent decision-making - comfortable setting priorities, SLAs, and quality bars without waiting to be handed the answer.
• System-level thinking - turns individual incidents into process and product improvements.
• Assertive and driven, comfortable pushing senior developers and managers when tickets stall; proven record leading cross-functional / matrix-managed teams (no direct reports).

It would be great if you also have:

• Hands-on experience with incident response and troubleshooting in production, ideally in networking / cloud infrastructure environments.
• Familiarity with observability and monitoring tooling (Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty).
• Comfort using automation and AI tooling to streamline operational work - scripting, agents, AIOps / LLM-based automation.
• Understanding of SASE / VPN / network fundamentals.