Senior Director of Escalation Engineering

Available Locations:  Lisbon, Portugal;  London, UK;  Austin, TX;  San Francisco, CA

About the Department

The Cloudflare Customer Support Team solves complicated problems and answers technical inquiries via phone, email, chat, and social media. Whether it is a blogger using our free services or a global 2000, large enterprise business with petabytes of web traffic, our team is always eager to assist. At Cloudflare, our Global Customer Support organization works directly with customers to ensure a world-class level of technical support for all our products and services. We are the eyes and ears of Cloudflare, acting as the real-time voice of the customer to help communicate their needs and real-world use cases back to the rest of the company - to help build a better service and future product development.

What you'll do

The Senior Director of Escalation Engineering will manage the highly technical Escalation Engineering team in Support, a global team that performs deep, technical troubleshooting for complex, escalated issues. This role owns the standard customer escalation process, critical escalation flows, escalation metrics and tracking, and works with all Product and Engineering teams to identify product bugs, network problems, and platform issues. Their global team acts as an escalation point and owner for many escalations per month: isolates, replicates and resolves problems while making the product and company better based on their learnings.

As the leader of our Escalation Engineering (EE) team, you will manage the global level 3/4 EE team and have direct input on improving all of our escalation processes including customer escalations, executive escalations, and monitored accounts. You will be responsible for ensuring the success of our customers by investing in the development of highly productive Escalation Engineers, highly efficient processes, and world-class tools and services. In addition you are part of the Support organization’s senior leadership team building strategy to provide our customers an outstanding customer experience.  You will bring strong relationship-building experience, deep technical and product knowledge, project management and organizational skills, as well as a high degree of empathy to ensure all customers’ satisfaction with Cloudflare’s services. 

Your responsibilities will include:

• Be the senior executive representative for the EE organization globally, both externally with customers and internally between various functions such as sales, solutions engineering, customer success, product and engineering.
• You will work directly with Product & Engineering to drive product improvements discovered by your team
• You have excellent communication skills and are able to present in front of audiences of various sizes and interests.
• You understand the fundamental technologies involved with the Internet, and the value proposition of Cloudflare’s products.
• Can handle complex and high-impact escalations involving various internal and external stakeholders.
• Able to develop and articulate a strategic vision for providing the world’s best customer support within the region, taking into account geography, languages, and country-specific technical challenges.  
• Can execute against short-term goals and long-term vision.  
• Understands the operational aspects of running a large, complex, fast-moving support team. This includes the entire lifecycle of a support issue, the various channels of engagements, understanding how issues are triaged based on impact and radius, being able to meet response SLAs, finding the shortest path to issue resolution, escalation handling when needed, and ultimately driving successful outcomes which result in high customer satisfaction.
• Deep understanding of important KPIs, how to use metrics to surface problem areas, and take necessary actions to improve lagging KPIs.
• You are a great people manager and motivator, including performance coaching, career development and hiring the best people across the region.
• Establish and track key performance metrics to evaluate team performance and identify areas for improvement.
• Act as a point of escalation for complex customer issues, working closely with internal teams to ensure timely resolution.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning and development within the customer support team.
• Understands change management principles in order to align various perspectives within the team, and then executing against needed change.
• Stay informed about industry trends and best practices in customer support

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge and experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in management of technical support managers and teams in the technology industry.
• Proven leader and motivator with deep experience building and leading growing customer support organization
• Experience serving in a Cloud Service Platform, Security and Networking company will be a huge plus
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build strong relationships with customers and internal stakeholders.
• Proven track record of driving customer success and achieving business outcomes.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams to deliver solutions that meet customer needs.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapt to changing priorities.