Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

OpenAI

Lead role in managing incidents and escalations within OpenAI's User Operations team. Collaborating with cross-functional teams to ensure exceptional customer support during high-pressure situations.

Posted 6/15/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $234,000 - $315,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

incident managementtechnical supportescalation managementSREtechnical program managementproduction operationsincident communicationsmonitoringobservabilityroot cause analysis

Soft Skills

leadershipcommunicationorganizationdecision-makingaccountabilitycalm under pressurestructured thinkingcollaborationproblem-solvingadaptability