Escalation Contract

Status: active.

Severity Definitions

• Sev1 - Full service outage, auth unavailable, or critical data integrity risk.
• Sev2 - Major feature degraded for many users, no safe workaround.
• Sev3 - Limited degradation, workaround available.
• Sev4 - Minor issue, no material business impact.

Response Targets

• Sev1: acknowledge <= 15 minutes, mitigation start <= 30 minutes.
• Sev2: acknowledge <= 30 minutes, mitigation start <= 60 minutes.
• Sev3: acknowledge <= 4 business hours, fix plan <= 1 business day.
• Sev4: acknowledge <= 1 business day, scheduled backlog handling.

Escalation Chain

1. On-call engineer (primary owner)
2. Platform/backend lead
3. Product owner / stakeholder representative
4. Executive escalation (institutional sponsor) for Sev1/extended Sev2

Communication Contract

• Open incident channel immediately for Sev1/Sev2.
• Post updates every 30 minutes for Sev1, every 60 minutes for Sev2.
• Include: impact, affected services, mitigation status, next update time.
• Publish postmortem for Sev1/Sev2 within 3 business days.

Mandatory Operational Artifacts

• Monitoring dashboard links for API health, auth, cache, error rates.
• Runbook links for session/auth failure, cache failure, DB degradation.
• Ownership matrix in docs/ownership/raci.md.

Pilot Acceptance Requirement

No pilot is considered operationally ready unless this contract and the RACI matrix are approved by maintainers and institutional stakeholders.