Global Incident Management

Job description

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

The Incident Ops team is a global ²⁴⁄₇ team responsible for driving incident response and management from detection to resolution. Stripe is proud of its five 9s reliability and this team is at the forefront of ensuring we keep it that way - working hand-in-hand with Reliability Eng and across the Tech Org. This team of incident response managers (IRM) is defined by our sense of ownership and how we drive incidents to resolution - marshaling the necessary cross-functional resources to respond to and resolve service outages, critical bugs, security attacks and anything that significantly impacts the users of our products. The team is user-first and ensures appropriate external communications from Stripe and senior management to keep our users informed of disruption to their experience of Stripe. The team is skilled in communications, incident handling and technical adeptness as incidents can arise from anywhere and cut across products and orgs in Stripe.

What you’ll do

This position entails leading and optimizing Stripe’s incident management processes and automation, ensuring efficiency and adherence to stringent incident response metrics. As the head of the incident response team, you will establish and maintain a best-in-class incident response framework, upholding the reliability standards expected of Stripe. Responsibilities include but are not limited to incident classification, escalation, and notification management, along with accountability for key incident response metrics (TTx). You will generate actionable insights to drive continuous improvement, collaborating with engineering leadership to refine incident detection, response, user communication, and tooling efficacy. Leadership and development of a highly effective ²⁴⁄₇ global incident response management team, characterized by urgency, programmatic ownership of incidents and communications, and the capacity to engage engineering teams, are crucial. Additionally, you will manage incident communications across multiple channels for executive and end-user audiences, and identify automation opportunities to streamline incident response workflows, thereby safeguarding users and minimizing disruption to their operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead the global ²⁴⁄₇ team of regional managers and incident response managers with ability to be hands-on and support frontline on-call with speed, cross-functional collaboration and escalation
• Develop and own Stripe’s incident response and management strategy and cross-functional roadmap, ensuring it aligns with the company’s reputation for reliability.
• Spearhead and manage Stripe’s AI-First strategy for automation of incident response workflows, partnering with the engineering team to implement required tooling enhancements.
• Enhance Stripe’s incident response by leading and implementing improvements derived from analyzing user-facing incidents and extracting actionable insights and learnings.
• Collaborate closely with executive leadership, engineering, and operations teams to lead significant programs and reshape workflows and metrics concerning reliability and incident operations.
• Manage relevant TTx metrics, particularly those related to communication and escalation. Collaborate with engineering leadership to implement necessary improvements for each metric.
• Develop user-focused metrics and data to guide Stripe’s incident response, reliability strategy, and user communications (including RCAs), ensuring impactful decision-making.

Who you are

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

Minimum requirements

• 10+ years of management experience, including 4+ years of experience managing managers with a proven record in building, growing and transforming teams.
• Extensive experience (8+ years) leading incident response for complex, large-scale distributed services with high SLOs/SLAs, coupled with deep expertise in crisis management.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, influence other leaders and deliver complex strategic projects involving multiple stakeholders
• Strong analytical skills, and the ability to use data to drive business decisions
• Possesses proficiency in basic incident troubleshooting and a reasonable understanding of system architecture. Fluent in using SQL, Splunk, or similar query languages.
• Exceptional communication abilities, capable of adapting incident updates for diverse audiences (executives, external users, internal teams).
• Affinity for a fast paced work environment, crafting strategic and rapid fixes to high intensity problems with a keen eye for detail and a high bar for quality
• Comfort navigating ambiguity, while identifying areas for process improvement and establishing best practices

Preferred qualifications

• Experience managing geographically dispersed teams
• Experience using infrastructure and application monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Sentry and others
• Experience in incident response at a high-growth technology company, preferably within the payments or e-commerce sectors.
• Proven ability to apply Agentic and Generative AI to revolutionize incident response, coupled with a strong grasp of current industry trends in the incident response domain.
• Demonstrated history of driving engineering and process enhancements to improve incident response efficiency within a rapidly expanding technology organization.