Senior Manager, Technical Excellence & Escalations

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Your Role:

The Senior Manager, Technical Excellence & Escalations leads the two teams that sit between Technical Support and the rest of the business: the global Technical Excellence team, staffed by our Technical Leads, and the global Escalations Engineering team.

Both produce Tenable's earliest and clearest signal about product supportability and customer risk. Both have historically produced that signal faster than the organization could act on it. This role exists to close that gap.

This is not a queue-management job. The Senior Manager is accountable for two outcomes: turning Technical Lead expertise and escalation findings into tracked change with Product and Engineering, and running one escalations practice that behaves identically in AMER, EMEA, and APJ.

The role sits within Operations & Scale and works in close partnership with the Sr. Director, who sets overall strategy and carries the executive narrative. The Senior Manager owns the operating model, the day-to-day practice, and the working-level relationships with Product and Engineering that make change actually happen. They lead senior individual contributors who are already force multipliers — which makes this a job about influence and orchestration, not direction.

Who You Are:

• An orchestrator, not a bottleneck. You create the conditions for senior experts to influence the organization instead of routing their work through yourself.
• Technically credible. You have the depth to earn respect from Principal-level engineers and to challenge an Engineering assessment that doesn't hold up.
• A clear communicator under pressure. You can hold a room containing both a frustrated customer and an Engineering lead, and translate technical detail into business consequence.
• A systems thinker. You are drawn to the pattern behind the escalation. You would rather fix the class of problem than win the individual case.
• Comfortable influencing without authority. Much of what this role must accomplish depends on teams you don't own.
• Effective remotely. You build trust and hold a team together without relying on being in the room, and you communicate in writing well enough that distance isn't a handicap.
• A developer of senior talent. You are energized by growing people who are already very good, and you give direct feedback.

Your Opportunity:

Technical Excellence Team

• Run the operating model and product coverage plan for the global Technical Excellence team — every strategic product has clear lead ownership, defined authority, and no coverage gaps across theaters.
• Set the team's working agenda: what leads work on, what they own, and how their time splits between reactive escalation support and proactive supportability work.
• Turn Technical Lead findings — defect patterns, supportability gaps, documentation failures, recurring friction — into one prioritized, evidence-backed agenda, not a stream of individual product complaints.
• Position Technical Leads as credible partners in Product and Engineering forums, with the data, framing, and support they need to influence rather than escalate.
• Contribute to the Technical Lead career path with the Education & Enablement Manager, and apply it consistently — progression from Technical Lead through Senior and Principal, and the competencies that separate each grade.

Global Escalations Practice

• Own the global escalations practice day to day: process design, entry and exit criteria, severity definitions, roles, communication standards, and adherence.
• Drive it to a single global standard. One model, consistently applied and measured across all theaters, with regional variance only where legally or operationally required.
• Operate and enforce the working agreement with Product Engineering — SLA adherence for escalated defects, prioritization criteria, update cadence, and follow-through on resolution commitments. Escalate structural breakdowns to the Sr. Director.
• Own the quality of post-escalation output. Every RCA and post-incident report produces a tracked action, not a filed document.
• Build the prevention agenda: analyze root cause patterns and drive the upstream product, process, tooling, or enablement changes that reduce escalation volume and re-escalation rate.
• Act as the Technical Support point of contact for high-severity customer situations — providing assurance and coordination without displacing the assigned Escalations Engineer.

Driving Change Across the Organization

• Represent Technical Support in roadmap, release readiness, and quality forums at the Product Management and Engineering Manager level, making the supportability and escalation-risk case with data.
• Run the working-level feedback loop into Product and Engineering: defined cadence, shared prioritization, visible tracking from support signal to shipped change.
• Assemble the evidence behind supportability investment — ticket volume, escalation cost, re-escalation overhead — and partner with the Sr. Director to convert it into a business case that earns engineering capacity.
• Partner with Engineering on release quality gates so Technical Support has meaningful input before GA, not remediation duty after it.
• Represent both teams in cross-functional work with Customer Success, Sales Engineering, and Professional Services where escalation or account risk is in scope.
• Produce the regular supportability and escalation readout for the Sr. Director: narrative, trend, and recommendation — not raw metrics. Present directly to senior leadership as requested.
• Work with the Operations Manager to instrument escalation and Technical Lead activity in TSO reporting, so the teams' signal is visible without manual pulls.

Leadership & People Development

• Lead and develop a senior, highly autonomous, globally distributed team, including the Principal Technical Lead as a technical partner and strategic extension of the function.
• Operate as a player-coach: hold the operating cadence and coach the team, and step personally into a live critical escalation or a difficult Engineering conversation when it matters.
• Build succession depth in both teams and eliminate single-person dependency on strategic products and accounts.
• Partner with the Education & Enablement Manager — a peer in the same function — to close skill gaps in both populations and feed field learnings into broader Technical Support enablement and certification.
• Set goals, performance expectations, and measurement for both teams in line with global Technical Support objectives.
• Drive AI adoption within Technical Lead and Escalations workflows under the Support AI governance framework, acting as the proving ground for capability the wider TSO will inherit.

What You'll Need:

• 8+ years in Technical Support, Escalation Management, or customer-facing engineering in enterprise software, with recent focus on security or vulnerability management.
• 3+ years managing technical teams — ideally senior individual contributors, technical leads, or escalation engineers. Experience managing remote and globally distributed teams strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience running an escalation practice or program, including process design and cross-functional coordination.
• Demonstrated ability to influence product and engineering priorities using support and escalation data.
• Experience operating within Support–Engineering agreements, including SLA adherence for defect resolution.
• Comfort with support metrics and the analysis behind them — escalation volume, re-escalation rate, time-to-resolution, ticket volume reduction — and the ability to build the evidence case for investment.
• Strong understanding of Tenable's product portfolio and security best practices, or the demonstrated ability to reach it quickly.
• Technical foundation across networking, authentication, operating systems, and cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) sufficient to lead technical discussions credibly.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; comfortable with senior stakeholders and with customers at any level.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
• Able to work in a hybrid/on-site capacity at our office in Columbia MD or Boston MA.
• Available to provide leadership coverage for critical escalations outside standard business hours as needed, and to work across AMER, EMEA, and APJ time zones to support globally distributed teams.
• Occasional travel as required for team, customer, and cross-functional engagements.
• Flexibility to perform other duties as deemed necessary by management.

And Ideally:

• Cybersecurity or adjacent enterprise security SaaS experience.
• Prior time as a Technical Lead, Principal Engineer, or Escalations Engineer — credibility earned in the seat.
• Product Management or program management exposure.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted support workflows and their governance.
• Experience supporting FedRAMP or other regulated environments.

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