incident-management-engineer

Incident Management Engineer

When to Use

• Define or revise severity levels and escalation policies
• Design on-call rotations, schedules, and handoffs
• Integrate alerting → paging → incident channel → ticket timeline
• Run blameless postmortem process and action-item tracking
• Report incident metrics and improve MTTR/MTTD
• Configure status page and customer comms workflows for outages

When NOT to Use

• Fix pipelines, deploys, or service code during outage → devops, fullstack-software-engineer
• Investigate malware, phishing, or SOC alerts → soc-analyst (deep hunts → defensive-security-analyst)
• Enterprise security IR and legal/compliance program → cybersecurity
• Cross-team launch programs and RAID → technical-program-manager
• Data platform-specific ops → data-system-ops-lead
• Write customer-facing runbooks only → tech-writer-researcher
• Single-account repro and support escalations → support-engineer

Related skills

Need	Skill
SLOs, error budgets, reliability metrics	site-reliability-engineer
Pipelines, alerts stack implementation	devops
Rollback and cutover during outage	deployment-strategist
Security incident playbooks	cybersecurity
SOC alert triage and playbooks	soc-analyst
Active CSIRT response, timelines, evidence	incident-responder
BCP/DRP, cyber recovery playbooks, restore tests, tabletops	bcm-disaster-recovery-specialist
Deep investigation, hunts, detections	defensive-security-analyst
Major cross-team incident coordination	technical-program-manager
Runbook documentation	tech-writer-researcher
Customer ticket repro and engineering escalation	support-engineer
Incident and crisis message packs	communication-lead
Exec/community customer escalation program	community-executive-escalations-program-manager

Core Workflows

1. Severity and escalation

1. Align severity to customer impact, not alert noise
2. Map each level: response time, who pages, comms required
3. Document escalation ladder (primary → secondary → manager → exec)
4. Review quarterly with recent incident data

See references/severity_escalation.md for matrix template.

2. On-call program

• Primary + secondary coverage; no single point of failure
• Rotation length: prefer weekly over daily for sustainability
• Fairness: track pages per person; cap repeat pages
• Handoff ritual with open incidents and deploy context

See references/on_call_design.md for rotation and handoff patterns.

3. Incident lifecycle tooling

Standard flow:

Alert → page → incident declared → comms channel → roles assigned → mitigate → resolve → postmortem

• Auto-create incident record with timeline (who/when)
• Integrate chat, tickets, and paging in one timeline
• Reserve manual steps for role assignment and customer comms approval

See references/incident_tooling.md for integration checklist.

4. Active incident (commander-lite)

During SEV1–2:

Role	Responsibility
Incident commander	Coordinates; does not debug alone
Communications	Internal + external updates on cadence
Technical lead(s)	Mitigation per service

• Time-box updates (e.g., every 30 min until stable)
• Log decisions in incident timeline
• Defer root-cause deep dive until mitigated

See references/incident_lifecycle.md for phases.

5. Postmortem program

• Blameless; focus on systems and process
• Within 48h for SEV1–2; required before closing incident
• Action items: owner, due date, tracked to completion
• Share learnings broadly; link detection gaps to monitoring (devops)

See references/postmortem_process.md for template and metrics.

6. Metrics and improvement

Track monthly:

• Incident count by severity
• MTTD, MTTR (mitigation and full resolution)
• Repeat incidents (same root cause class)
• Postmortem action item closure rate
• On-call load (pages per engineer)

When to load references

• SEV matrix and escalation → references/severity_escalation.md
• Rotations and handoffs → references/on_call_design.md
• Lifecycle phases → references/incident_lifecycle.md
• PagerDuty/Slack/ticket wiring → references/incident_tooling.md
• Postmortems and metrics → references/postmortem_process.md