Incident Response Engineer; Hybrid- Greenfield

Incident Response Engineer / Support Engineer (Production Stability & Incident Response)

Location: Irvine, CA (Hybrid: Onsite Mon–Thurs, Remote Fridays)

UNABLE TO OFFER SPONSOR SHIPS- US CITIZENS AND GREEN CARD HOLDERS ONLY

Type: Contract-to-Hire | High-Impact, Greenfield Organization

Level: Mid–Senior Engineer

We are seeking a Incident Response/ Application Support Engineer to play a critical role in maintaining production stability across a fast-growing, distributed engineering platform. This role is designed for a senior-minded engineer who thrives in high-signal, high-responsibility environments and excels at incident triage, coordination, and recovery—
without owning product features or making unilateral production changes
.

Your mission is simple but vital:
make production quieter, more predictable, and less disruptive
— for customers and engineers alike.

This role sits at the intersection of engineering, operations, and communication. You’ll act as the primary daytime responder for production incidents
, ensuring issues are triaged efficiently, escalations are controlled, and service owners are engaged through clear, approved processes.

• Serve as the first responder for production incidents during core business hours
• Triage issues across distributed systems and identify severity, scope, and impact
• Coordinate incident response with service owners, infrastructure, and engineering teams
• Drive service restoration through documented runbooks and approved escalation paths
• Communicate clearly and calmly during incidents — status, impact, mitigation, and next steps
• Document incidents, postmortems, and recurring failure patterns
• Surface systemic reliability risks
  and help turn recurring issues into planned work
• Build and maintain incident workflows, runbooks, and escalation standards
• Reduce ad-hoc interruptions to feature teams by creating a single, predictable entry point for production issues

• Build or own product features
• Make product or architectural decisions
• Own services long-term
• Perform ad-hoc, emergency, or unauthorized production changes
• Act as a “fix everything” engineer

This role is about control, coordination, and clarity
, not heroics.

• Fewer production escalations reaching feature teams
• Faster incident response and recovery times
• Clear ownership and calm coordination during outages
• Reduced engineer interruptions and burnout
• Improved visibility into reliability and operational risks
• Recurring issues become planned engineering work — not repeated firefighting

• Primary focus on core business hours
• Acts as the daytime production responder
• After-hours coverage via a lightweight on-call rotation
• Escalations limited to high-severity incidents only

This phase prioritizes stability, predictability, and process
— not full 24/7 coverage.

• Mid–senior engineering experience with real production incident exposure
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems and backend services
• Comfort operating in production environments with incomplete context
• Proven judgment under pressure and ability to lead incident response
• Experience investigating unfamiliar systems safely and methodically
• Clear written and verbal communication skills — especially during outages
• Familiarity with incident management, runbooks, and escalation frameworks

Seniority is defined by judgment and autonomy — not years of experience.

• High ownership without feature churn
• Clear boundaries and expectations — no “everything engineer” trap
• Greenfield opportunity to define production support the
  right way
• Direct impact on reliability, engineering focus, and team health
• Startup-level influence within a stable, well-funded organization
• Hybrid work model with strong collaboration and visibility