incident commander
also: IC, incident lead, duty officer
The person designated to lead and coordinate the response to a critical system incident or outage, making decisions and communicating status across teams.
An incident commander (IC) is a role adopted from emergency management and applied to IT operations. During a critical incident—such as a major service outage, security breach, or data loss—the IC takes charge of the response effort, coordinating between engineering teams, management, and stakeholders.
The IC's responsibilities include declaring the incident severity, assembling the right teams, running a war room or bridge call, making go/no-go decisions (like rolling back a deployment), and ensuring clear communication. For example, if a database corruption causes an e-commerce site to go down, the IC might coordinate the database team's recovery efforts, keep the executive team updated, and decide whether to fail over to a backup system.
The IC role is critical in Linux and DevOps environments because incidents often require rapid cross-functional decision-making. Tools like incident tracking systems, on-call schedules, and chat channels help the IC manage the response and document what happened for post-incident analysis.