Senior Technical Incident Manager

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

• Provide oversight and strategic coordination of end-to-end service delivery across critical platforms and systems.

• Proactively identify service trends, recurring issues, and systemic failures, and lead efforts to drive permanent resolutions.

• Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews with stakeholders, identifying patterns and continuous improvement opportunities.

• Mentor and guide junior team members in incident and problem resolution techniques, ensuring knowledge transfer and skills development.

• Act as the primary escalation point for complex incidents, owning resolution and customer communication at the senior level.

• Drive continuous improvement across monitoring, automation, and system reliability to reduce operational noise and increase system resiliency.

• Lead incident bridges and engage with engineering teams and senior stakeholders to ensure timely resolution and high-quality communications.

• Champion best practices in service management including SLAs/OLAs, change management, and problem management processes.

• Contribute to tooling strategy and capability enhancements for observability, incident management, and analytics.

• Own key relationships with cross-functional partners including DevOps, Cloud Engineering, and Product teams to ensure operational readiness and service alignment.

• Represent the team in technical leadership forums and contribute to operational strategy and planning.

• Ensure consistent shift readiness by reviewing and refining runbooks, escalation paths, and shift documentation.

• Promote a culture of quality by embedding service excellence in operational procedures, ensuring processes are optimized for consistency, performance, and reliability.

• Measure and track key quality indicators and ensure feedback loops are in place for ongoing improvement.

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience with 6 to 9 years in IT operations, site reliability, or service delivery within enterprise or SaaS environments.

• Deep understanding of Cloud architectures (Microsoft Azure, AWS, or GCP), infrastructure monitoring, and incident response.

• Demonstrated experience managing incidents in high-availability, high-throughput, mission-critical environments.

• Strong technical background with ability to lead troubleshooting across infrastructure, networking, application, and platform services.

• Advanced knowledge of monitoring, alerting, and observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Opsgenie, Datadog, Prometheus, etc.).

• Expert-level understanding of ITIL processes, particularly Incident, Problem, and Change Management.

• Experience conducting technical postmortems, producing RCA reports, and implementing service improvement plans.

• Proven ability to influence and collaborate with cross-functional technical teams and senior management.

• Strong leadership presence during high-impact events; comfortable leading conversations with engineering leaders and executive stakeholders.

• Demonstrated mentoring and coaching experience; ability to develop junior engineers and promote operational excellence culture.

• Strong focus on quality assurance within service delivery, with a commitment to maintaining high standards in documentation, execution, and outcomes.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to tailor messages to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Adaptability to evolving technologies and a strong drive to automate and improve existing processes.

• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation and provide senior-level support during critical incidents.

Cerence Inc. (Nasdaq: CRNC and ) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world. Spun out from Nuance in October 2019, Cerence is a new, independent company that has quickly gained traction as a leader in the automotive voice assistant space, working with all of the world's leading automakers – from Ford and Fiat Chrysler to Daimler, Audi and BMW to Geely and SAIC – to transform how a car feels, responds and learns. Its track record is built on more than 20 years of industry experience and leadership and more than 500 million cars on the road today across more than 70 languages.  

As Cerence looks to the future and continues an ambitious growth agenda, we need someone to join the team and help build the future of voice and AI in cars. This is an exciting opportunity to join Cerence's passionate, dedicated, global team and be a part of meaningful innovation in a rapidly growing industry. 

Cerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

All prospective and current Employees need to remain vigilant when it comes to executing security policies in the workplace. This includes:

- Following workplace security protocols and training programs to familiarize with the ways to maintain a safe workplace.
- Following security procedures to report any suspicious activity.
- Having respect for corporate security procedures to allow those procedures to be effective.
- Adhering to company's compliance and regulations.
- Encouraging to follow a zero tolerance for workplace violence.

- Basic knowledge of information security and data privacy requirements (e.g., how to protect data & how to be handling this data).

- Demonstrative knowledge of information security through internal training programs.