Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on lead to build and run OpenAI's Incidents & Escalations function within User Operations. This is a player-coach role with a meaningful hands-on operating component. You will set the operating model and also step into active incidents and urgent escalations when needed, coordinating with on-call teams, driving clear ownership, supporting communications, and ensuring issues move through resolution and post-incident closure.

During active incidents, you will coordinate with the relevant on-call teams and cross-functional responders across Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, and Go-To-Market. You will help keep teams aligned, maintain timelines, clarify ownership, escalate when needed, and ensure internal, executive, customer-facing, and external communications are accurate and timely, including status page updates when required.

For escalations, you will build and run the processes for tracking, triaging, mitigating, and resolving critical customer and user issues. After incidents and escalations, you will own the follow-through: retrospectives, root cause identification, action item tracking, trend analysis, and process improvements that reduce repeat issues over time. You will also help define the long-term operating model for incidents and escalations across Support Delivery, Engineering, Infrastructure, and other cross-functional partners.

This role is ideal for someone who can operate calmly under pressure, bring structure to ambiguity, communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences, and improve the system while overseeing day to day operations.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You Will

• Participate in an on-call rotation and serve as the active incident lead during live incidents and urgent escalations.
• Own alert intake and triage process across support, safety, customer, and service-impacting issues.
• Assess severity, determine scope and impact, and initiate the appropriate response path.
• Page and coordinate Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, Legal, Policy, Go-To-Market, and other teams as needed.
• Lead incident response calls, manage timelines, clarify roles, and keep responders focused and unblocked.
• Set internal guidelines for incident communications to all users, including enterprise customers, and own internal updates, executive briefings, customer-facing updates, and external status page updates where required.
• Maintain situational awareness across all customer-facing incidents and parallel workstreams, ensuring the response remains coordinated and customer impact is understood.
• Create and operate the process for monitoring, processing, mitigating, and resolving critical escalations, including formal closure and handoff.
• Identify root causes behind incidents and escalations, lead retrospectives, and coordinate corrective action with accountable teams.
• Track corrective actions to closure and ensure follow-through is focused on the best possible customer outcome.
• Identify recurring operational issues, escalation patterns, and product or process gaps.
• Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Product and Support leaders to stay ahead of customer-facing incidents, reduce repeat issues, and improve readiness.
• Improve incident response processes, severity frameworks, playbooks, tooling, reporting, and automation.
• Build a durable operating model for incidents and escalations as OpenAI scales globally.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 10+ years of experience in incident management, technical support, escalation management, SRE, technical program management, or production operations.
• Have 5+ years of hands-on experience working in production, on-call, or high-urgency operational environments.
• Have 5+ years of leadership experience, ideally in a Support, Engineering, or similar environment.
• Are comfortable acting as Incident Commander, owning coordination, decision-making, communication, and accountability during live incidents.
• Have direct experience with customer-impacting incidents, executive escalations, safety-sensitive escalations, or high-severity technical issues.
• Can communicate clearly under pressure with engineers, support teams, executives, customer-facing teams, and external stakeholders.
• Have hands-on experience with incident communications, including internal updates, executive briefings, customer updates, and status pages.
• Are experienced with incident management, paging, and alerting tools such as incident.io, PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, or similar systems.
• Understand monitoring and observability well enough to reason about alerts, system health, customer impact, and incident scope.
• Can lead post-incident retrospectives that produce clear root causes, corrective actions, and durable improvements.
• Drive action items to closure and hold teams accountable without creating unnecessary process drag.
• Are highly organized, calm, and structured in ambiguous or high-pressure situations.
• Can balance hands-on incident execution with longer-term systems building.
• Are excited to use AI and automation to improve triage, routing, summarization, reporting, knowledge management, and incident follow-through.