Escalation Engineering Lead

WHY WE’RE LOOKING FOR YOU

As Retool continues to scale rapidly, we need an experienced technical leader to build and manage our Escalation Engineering team. This role will be instrumental in establishing and driving technical excellence across our Technical Customer Experience (TCX) organization, ensuring we maintain the highest customer support standards as we handle increasingly complex deployments and critical customer situations. You will shape the strategic direction of our incident management processes, deployment practices, and technical support capabilities while fostering a culture of continuous improvement, technical excellence, and ensuring that every customer interaction adds value to their experience with Retool.

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

You will lead and develop a team of Escalation Engineers while working closely with leaders across Support Engineering, Sales Engineering, Professional Services, and Technical Account Management. You will build strong partnerships with Engineering leadership to influence product improvements, deployment strategies, and technical solutions. As a key leader within TCX, you'll collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to drive initiatives that enhance our customer experience and technical capabilities.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU’LL: 

• Build and lead the Escalation Engineering team, setting the technical vision and standards for handling our most complex customer issues and critical incidents.
• Define and iterate on the scope of escalations for supporting internal TCX teams, ensuring stakeholders have clear next steps on ownership and options for resolving technical blockers for customers.
• Manage and optimize the customer-visible incident management processes, ensuring efficient resolution of P0 issues while maintaining clear communication channels between customers, support teams, and engineering.
• Represent trends in customer infrastructure blockers with Engineering and Product teams to inform and improve our self-hosted product offerings and troubleshooting capabilities, reducing the need for critical resolutions.
• Coordinate your team’s contributions towards training programs and mentorship frameworks that elevate the technical capabilities of all customer-facing teams.
• Partner with Technical Enablement to identify opportunities in escalation trends from TCX teams that can be improved in our technical onboarding, enablement, and certification initiatives.
• Define and track key performance indicators for the Escalation team, ensuring alignment with broader TCX and company objectives while maintaining transparency in team impact and success metrics.
• Keep abreast of new technologies and methodologies to continuously improve our technical standards.
• Champion a culture of inclusiveness, empathy, technical excellence, collaborative problem-solving, and customer-first thinking across the organization.

THE SKILLSETS YOU’LL BRING: 

• 8+ years of technical experience, with at least 3 years managing technical teams in a customer-facing environment, preferably in a B2B SaaS company.
• Proven track record of building and leading high-performing technical teams, with experience in hiring, developing, and retaining technical talent.
• Extensive experience in incident management and critical situation handling, with a strong understanding of best practices in technical support operations.
• Steady and empathetic leadership in the face of the unknown, with a track record of rallying teams to partner together to resolve blockers impacting customers.
• Strong technical leadership abilities, demonstrated through successful cross-functional collaboration and influence with engineering teams.
• Advanced knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and enterprise authentication systems (OAuth 2.0, SAML, Okta).
• Strategic thinking capabilities with a track record of implementing successful technical initiatives that drive measurable business impact.
• Deep technical expertise in fullstack development, including advanced knowledge of JavaScript, various database systems, and modern web technologies.