Incident Manager (EMEA)

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in technical operations, SRE, support, or incident management roles, including at least 2 years of direct Incident Management experience leading high-severity incidents
• Strong troubleshooting and analytical skills in a 24x7 operational environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Working knowledge of AI-assisted tools and the ability to apply them effectively to incident analysis, documentation, and process improvement
• Ability to remain calm and structured during high-pressure situations
• Proven ability to assume command during high-severity incidents, bringing structure, clarity, and decisive direction in fast-moving, ambiguous situations
• Flexibility in working hours to support business needs, including participation in an on-call rotation coverage
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or equivalent experience
• (Desirable) Experience leading incident response calls and driving cross-team coordination
• (Desirable) Strong influencing skills when working across teams without direct authority
• (Desirable) Familiarity with IT service management principles (ITIL, Incident, Change, Problem Management)
• (Desirable) Experience with incident management tooling
• (Desirable) Exposure to security or compliance-related incident response
• (Desirable) Basic scripting skills (Bash, Python, JavaScript) to support operational improvements
• (Desirable) Relevant technical or ITIL certifications

What the job involves

• As an Incident Manager at Cockroach Labs, you will lead the coordination and resolution of incidents across internal systems, CockroachDB Cloud, customer-hosted environments, and security/compliance events in the EMEA region.
• You will drive structured response efforts, ensure clear communication with stakeholders, and partner with cross-functional teams to identify root causes and prevent recurrence.
• Manage the full lifecycle of incidents from detection through resolution, ensuring adherence to established incident management processes.
• Lead and coordinate cross-functional response efforts to drive timely and effective incident resolution.
• Declare and escalate high-severity incidents, mobilizing appropriate stakeholders and leadership as needed.
• Serve as an escalation point for critical incidents and support crisis response activities.
• Lead structured root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, ensuring actionable follow-up items are identified.
• Track corrective actions to completion to reduce repeat incidents.
• Provide clear, timely communication to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customer-facing updates when required.
• Contribute to incident metrics tracking (e.g., MTTR, MTTD, recurrence) and support reporting on trends and areas for improvement.
• Support ongoing improvements to incident management processes, documentation, and tooling.
• Participate in a rotational on-call schedule to ensure 24x7 coverage for high-severity incidents.

In your first 30 days, you will familiarize yourself with CockroachDB, our customers, and our company. We will provide some self-guided onboarding with reading and hands-on material to familiarize yourself with the company and some of the responsibilities of the role. During this period, you will also start to get acquainted with our incident management protocols and tools, and begin shadowing incident response activities to observe and learn from other team members with an eye to future improvements and optimizations.

After 3 months, you will be integrated into the company and will be familiar with the various systems we use. You will be able to manage incidents from both internal and customer environments and will be actively contributing to the Incident Management program. You will be leading incident response efforts, conducting root cause analyses, and participating in post-incident reviews.