Senior Manager, Technical Excellence & Escalations
tenable · United States, - Massachusetts, Boston, Maryland, Columbia
Who is Tenable?
Tenable® is the Exposure Management company. Over 40,000 organizations around the globe rely on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk. Our global employees support 65 percent of the Fortune 500, 50 percent of the Global 2000, and large government agencies. Come be part of our journey!
What makes Tenable such a great place to work?
Ask a member of our team and they’ll answer, “Our people!” We work together to build and innovate best-in-class cybersecurity solutions for our customers; all while creating a culture of belonging, respect, and excellence where we can be our best selves. When you’re part of our #OneTenable team, you can expect to partner with some of the most talented and passionate people in the industry, and have the support and resources you need to do work that truly matters. We deliver results that exceed expectations and we win together!
Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. without sponsorship. We are unable to provide sponsorship for work visas of any kind at the time of hire, or at any point during employment. This includes, but is not limited to: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, J-1, etc
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 Ma