Escalation Manager – Application Security

Black Duck Software Inc. helps organizations build secure high-quality software minimizing risks while maximizing speed and productivity. Black Duck a recognized pioneer in application security provides SAST SCA and DAST solutions that enable teams to quickly find and fix vulnerabilities and defects in proprietary code open source components and application behavior. With a combination of industry-leading tools services and expertise only Black Duck helps organizations maximize security and quality in DevSecOps and throughout the software development life cycle.

The Escalation Manager is a senior customer-critical role responsible for owning and resolving high-impact complex issues that fall outside standard support processes. This role acts as thecentral pointof coordination between customers support engineering product and leadership teams.

In an application security context the Escalation Manager ensurestimelyresolution of issues related to vulnerability detection scanning CI/CD integrations and security workflows - whilemaintainingcustomer trust minimizing business impact and driving systemic improvements across the organization.

Core Responsibilities

Incident Ownership & Crisis Management

• Take end-to-end ownership of critical escalations (technical operational or security-impacting).
• Drive issues from identification through resolution ensuring accountability across teams.
• Establish urgency prioritize effectively and manage multiple concurrent escalations.
• Lead incident bridges war rooms and executive updates during critical situations.

Customer Advocacy & Stakeholder Management

• Act as the voice of the customer internally especially for high-value or at-risk accounts.
• Communicate clearly with both technical and executive stakeholders.
• Set expectations provide transparent updates and rebuild customer confidence.
• Manage sensitive situations involving SLAs security concerns or production outages.

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Coordinate efforts across Support Engineering Product Management DevOps and Sales.
• Influence teams without direct authority to ensure timely delivery of fixes and workarounds.
• Align internal priorities with customer impact and business risk.

Technical Oversight (Application Security Focus)

Understand and guide resolution of issues related to:

• SAST DAST SCA and Container Security tools
• CI/CD pipeline integrations (e.g. Jenkins GitHub Actions GitLab)
• Vulnerability scanning false positives/negatives and policy enforcement
• Large-scale codebase scanning and performance bottlenecks
• Provide direction on best practices for secure development and scanning strategies.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) & Problem Management

• Lead detailed RCA efforts for critical incidents.
• Conduct post-mortems and ensure documentation of findings.
• Identify systemic gaps in product process or infrastructure.
• Drive preventive actions to reduce recurrence and improve platform reliability.

Process & Operational Excellence

• Define and continuously improve escalation frameworks playbooks and runbooks.
• Establish and enforce SLAs OLAs and escalation thresholds.
• Optimize triage processes for faster identification and resolution of issues.
• Introduce automation and tooling improvements where applicable.

Reporting Insights & Continuous Improvement

• Track escalation trends root causes and resolution metrics.
• Provide regular reports to leadership highlighting risks patterns and opportunities.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to influence roadmap based on customer pain points.
• Contribute to knowledge base training and enablement for support teams.

Risk & Compliance Awareness

• Handle escalations involving security vulnerabilities withappropriate sensitivity.
• Ensure adherence to security best practices compliance standards and data privacy requirements.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams when required.

Key Qualifications

• 510 years in Escalation Management Technical Support Incident Management or Customer Success.
• Experience in SaaS enterprise software or cybersecurity/application security domains.
• Strong understanding of: Application Security (SAST DAST SCA Container Security) CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices APIs microservices cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) Debugging complex system and performance issues
• Familiarity with tools such as Jira Salesforce Splunk Kibana or similar.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to translate complex technical issues into concise executive-level summaries.
• Experience handling high-pressure customer interactions and escalations.
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Strong problem-solving decision-making and prioritization skills.
• High emotional intelligence (EQ) with the ability to manage conflict and build trust.
• Calm structured and decisive under pressure.

Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Technology Business or a related field (preferred).

Success Metrics

• Reduction in escalation volume and recurrence rate
• Time to resolution (TTR) for critical issues
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and retention for escalated accounts
• SLA adherence and incident response effectiveness
• Improvement in product stability and support efficiency

What Success Looks Like in This Role

• Customers feel heard supported and confident even during critical incidents
• Escalations are resolved efficiently with minimal business impact
• Systemic issues are identified early and prevented proactively
• Strong alignment exists between customer needs and internal execution

Black Duck considers all applicants for employment without regard to race color religion sex gender preference national origin age disability or status as a Covered Veteran in accordance with federal addition Black Duck complies with applicable state and local laws prohibiting discrimination in employment in every jurisdiction in which it maintains facilities. Black Duck also provides reasonable accommodation to individuals with a disability in accordance with applicable laws.