Information Technology Specialist (Incident Responder)

Job Description

Love being the first responder when things break? Zendesk is looking for Incident Responders who thrive in fast-paced environments—people who can triage quickly, swarm with the right teams, and restore service while keeping the incident record accurate. This role is critical to our hybrid SRE model, supporting incident triage, restoration, and post-incident reviews across our 70+ CIO-owned applications.

The Role

The Incident Responder will support the incident management and response capability for Zendesk’s internal IT services. You will participate in incident triage and restoration, join incident swarming with domain teams and the Incident Commander, and contribute to post-incident reviews (PIRs). As part of the on-call rotation, you will respond to alerts, vendor status page impacts, and ticket-based escalations—helping to reduce MTTR and improve reliability across Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ, EISS, and other critical SaaS applications.

This is a hands-on operational role that combines technical triage, collaboration, and process adherence. You will work closely with the Incident Response Lead, Observability, Problem Management, and domain/platform teams.

What You’ll Do

• Participate in incident triage and restoration—assess severity, update incident records, and coordinate with resolver teams.

• Join incident swarming—work with the Incident Commander, domain owners, and platform teams to restore service.

• Respond to on-call alerts, RSS feed monitoring for SaaS outages, and GSD ticket escalations (e.g., >5 tickets/hour).

• Maintain accurate incident documentation in Incident.I/O; ensure status updates and resolution notes are timely.

• Contribute to post-incident reviews (PIRs) and blameless postmortems; capture action items for Problem Management.

• Execute runbooks and escalation paths; follow defined severity models and communication cadences.

• Partner with Observability & Monitoring to improve detection and alert-driven incident creation.

• Collaborate with Service Desk on intake, routing, and escalation criteria.

• Support continuous improvement: reduce MTTR, improve time-to-detect, and strengthen incident response maturity.

What You Bring

• Required: 3+ years of experience in Incident Management, SRE, NOC, IT Operations, or Service Desk escalation roles.

• Preferred: Experience in a global, high-growth tech company with SaaS applications.

• Working knowledge of ITIL Incident Management and practical experience with incident response or war-room coordination.

• Experience participating in high-severity incident response; calm under pressure; able to document and communicate clearly.

• Familiarity with incident tools (e.g., Incident.I/O, PagerDuty) and collaboration channels (Slack, Zoom).

• Understanding of SaaS applications, integrations (Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ), and common failure modes.

• Good communication and collaboration skills—able to work across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Exposure to observability, monitoring, or alerting (Datadog, Prometheus, etc.) is a plus.

Nice to Have

• ITIL 4 Foundation or Incident Management certification

• Experience with automation/scripting (Python, PowerShell) for runbooks

• Knowledge of SRE principles and blameless postmortem culture

• Previous experience at a SaaS company or in a customer support tech stack environment

How We’ll Measure Success

• Contribution to reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Detect (MTTD).

• Timely and accurate incident documentation and status updates.

• Effective participation in incident swarming and PIRs.

• Adherence to on-call rotation and escalation standards.

• Demonstrated collaboration with Incident Response Lead and Problem Management.

#LI-MR7

Hybrid: In this role, our hybrid experience is designed at the team level to give you a rich onsite experience packed with connection, collaboration, learning, and celebration - while also giving you flexibility to work remotely for part of the week. This role must attend our local office for part of the week. The specific in-office schedule is to be determined by the hiring manager.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.

Zendesk is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster global diversity, equity, & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment and employees at Zendesk are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an AA/EEO/Veterans/Disabled employer. If you are based in the United States and would like more information about your EEO rights under the law, please click here.

Zendesk endeavors to make reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans pursuant to applicable federal and state law. If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to submit this application, complete any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participate in the employee selection process, please send an e-mail to peopleandplaces@zendesk.com with your specific accommodation request.