Information Technology Lead

Job Description Love leading under pressure and turning chaos into clarity? Zendesk is looking for an Incident Response Lead who thrives in the heat of an outage—someone who can triage quickly, swarm the right people, and restore service while keeping stakeholders informed. This role is critical to our hybrid SRE model, driving incident swarming, restoration, and blameless post-incident reviews across our 70 CIO-owned applications. The Role: The Incident Response Lead will own the incident management and response capability for Zendesk’s internal IT services. You will lead incident triage and restoration, coordinate incident swarming with domain teams and SREs, and facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) that drive learning and prevention. As Incident Commander, you will be the single point of coordination during major outages—ensuring clear communication, dynamic team assembly, and rapid restoration across Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ, EISS, and other critical SaaS applications. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines technical triage, process ownership, and calm coordination under pressure. You will partner closely with Observability, Problem Management, and Change Management to reduce MTTR and improve reliability. What You Will Do: Lead incident triage and restoration—declare incidents, assess severity, and coordinate response across resolver teams. Drive incident swarming—assemble dynamic response teams; coordinate with domain owners, platform teams, and vendors to restore service. Serve as Incident Commander for major (Sev 0–2) IT incidents; own communication cadence and status updates to stakeholders. Facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) and blameless postmortems; ensure action items are captured and handed off to Problem Management. Partner with Observability & Monitoring to improve detection, alert hygiene, and incident creation from monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog). Maintain incident runbooks, escalation paths, and on-call rotation standards for the Incident Response Squad. Collaborate with Service Desk and Global Service Desk on intake, routing, and escalation criteria (e.g., >5 tickets/hour triggers). Champion the hybrid SRE incident model—swarming with ITSM tracking, aligned severity definitions, and unified tooling (Incident.I/O). Contribute to continuous improvement: reduce MTTR, improve time-to-detect, and strengthen incident response maturity. What You Bring: Required: 5 years of experience in Incident Management, SRE, NOC, or IT Operations roles. Preferred: Experience in a global, high-growth tech company with SaaS applications. Strong working knowledge of ITIL Incident Management and practical experience with incident swarming or war-room coordination. Experience leading high-severity incident response; calm under pressure; able to synthesize technical details into clear status updates. Familiarity with incident tools (e.g., Incident.I/O, PagerDuty, Revere) and collaboration channels (Slack, Zoom). Understanding of SaaS applications, integrations (Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ), and common failure modes. Excellent communication and facilitation skills—able to coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders. Exposure to observability, monitoring, or alerting (Datadog, Prometheus, etc.). Understanding of severity models, escalation paths, and post-incident review best practices. Nice to Have: ITIL 4 Foundation or Incident Management certification Experience with automation/scripting (Python, PowerShell) for runbooks or incident enrichment Knowledge of SRE principles, error budgets, and blameless postmortem culture Previous experience at a SaaS company or in a customer support tech stack environment How We Will Measure Success: Reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD). Timely completion of PIRs and handoff of action items to Problem Management. Improved incident response coordination and stakeholder satisfaction during outages. A ... (truncated, view full listing at source)