Engineering Manager, Incident Management

The USDS JV Incident Management Team (IMT) is a critical team within the USDS JV Tech and Product organization, dedicated to ensuring the resilience and reliability of TikTok’s U.S. Data Security infrastructure. As a security-first division, we focus on providing specialized oversight and protection for U.S. user data and the platforms that support them.

While global teams monitor overall service health, IMT is uniquely positioned to manage the "blast radius" within the USDS environment. We act as the bridge between technical engineering teams (SRE, Infrastructure, Platform) and business stakeholders, ensuring that every major incident is handled with the precision and urgency required by our unique operating environment.

As a Manager of the Incident Management, you will be at the forefront of protecting the TikTok experience for millions of users. You will join a cohesive, proficient team committed to upholding the highest standards of professionalism and technical expertise, directly contributing to the safety and security of the U.S. digital ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Lead, manage, mentor, and coach Incident Managers to strengthen their technical expertise and foster a culture of excellence, accountability, and continuous growth.
• Provide technical leadership across projects, define long-term architectural direction, and drive initiatives aligned with business goals and scalability needs.
• Serve as the point of escalation for high-severity incidents. Oversee and deliver clear, timely, and accurate communications to internal stakeholders, executive leadership, and customer-facing teams during critical incidents.
• Analyze incident data and operational metrics to identify systemic trends. Drive cross-organizational initiatives to reduce Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Maintain highly visible operational dashboards to support IMT decisions and provide visibility into system health as well as incident metrics.
• Facilitate blameless post-mortems, ensuring root causes are thoroughly identified, actionable remediation items are tracked, and lessons learned are shared globally.
• Partner closely with SREs, Infrastructure, and development teams to refine alert thresholds, reduce alert fatigue, and ensure escalation pathways are optimized.
• Design and build automated workflows to streamline incident response, such as automated stakeholder communications, auto-remediation scripts, and tool integrations.
• Participate in a 24/7 coverage, ensuring operational efficiency and communications during incidents, including weekends and holidays as needed..

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor or above degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline with 5+ years of experience in Incident Management, SRE, Production Engineering roles, including 5+ years of experience leading and managing engineering teams and projects, along with in-depth involvement in large-scale distributed systems and applications, networking, operating systems, infrastructure-related services, and storage.
• Proven track record of building and leading high performing teams responsible for running and supporting distributed services/systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of cloud computing concepts (AWS, GCP, or Azure), modern infrastructure architectures (microservices, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines), and modern observability tools.
• Experience with incident management and a blameless postmortem culture.
• Strong understanding of operational KPIs, SLAs, and system reliability engineering practices.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with a track record of translating deeply technical issues into clear business impact summaries for leadership.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL incident management frameworks or modern DevOps/SRE incident management and response practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Incident Management, Production Support, or SRE/Operations within a large-scale SaaS or cloud environment.
• Proven experience implementing auto-remediation workflows, or Event-Driven Ansible/Runbook automation to programmatically resolve common alerts.
• Advanced proficiency with modern incident orchestration platforms like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, JIRA Service Management, and Slack integrations.
• Experience coaching and training engineering teams on best practices for Incident Management and conducting constructive post-mortems.