Major Incident Manager

A leading Investment bank are hiring a Contractor (VP-level) Major Incident Manager to lead the end-to-end management of high-severity technology incidents across complex, regulated environment. You will command incidents from detection through restoration, ensure crisp executive communications, drive cross technology recovery and influence decisions that that have a direct impact on operational stability

Key Responsibilities:

Incident Command and Service Restoration

• Lead and coordinate Major Incidents across infrastructure, application, middleware, cloud, EUC, network, identity, data and third parties.
• Establish incident command structure (team roles, bridge calls, comms structure), ensure clear ownership, decision-making and rapid triage.
• Drive restoration by coordinating technical SMEs, vendors, and operations teams; remove blockers and manage dependencies
• Maintain operation discipline: timelines, actions, risks, and decisions are captured accurately in real time and provided regularly to senior management stakeholders for awareness and feedback.
• Manage senior stakeholders across Technology and Business: set expectations, manage impact narrative and escalate decisively.
• Risk and Impact analysis. Rapidly assess the wider implications of outages (business impact, risk, data/security exposure, regulatory/compliance risk, downstream system dependencies, reputational impact) and drive timely escalation, mitigation decisions, and clear risk-based communications to senior stakeholders.
• There may also be a requirement to perform Change and Problem Management responsibilities should coverage be needed. These primarily take the form of post incident stakeholder management and change risk management. There may often be requirements to host meetings with senior technology stakeholders to co-ordinate.
• Perform handover of live incidents concisely summarizing actions, impact and risk to ensure seamless transition of responsibilities to inter-regional counterparts (follow the sun model).

Skills

• 3+ years of experience leading major incidents in a large-scale, 24/7 production environment (financial services strongly preferred).
• Proven ability as incident commander under pressure with strong operational judgement.
• Strong understanding of modern technology stack (e.g., distributed systems, cloud, networks, identity, databases, messaging).
• An exceptionally strong logical mindset suited to complex problem solving of unfamiliar technology systems
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity concepts and operational risk (e.g., common attack methodologies, identity/access, data protection, logging/monitoring, cyber control degradation). The ability to assess whether an incident has potential security impact and pivot response methods accordingly.
• Solid grasp of ITIL-aligned practices (Incident, Problem, Change) and how they work in real enterprise environments
• Exception written and verbal communication: can translate technical detail into business risk and actions quickly.
• Strong stakeholder management: able to influence without authority and challenge senior technology management and SMEs respectfully.
• Excellent organizational skills, with the capability to manage multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Ability to develop close relationships with executives, departments, and leadership teams
• Understanding of data center infrastructure (i.e. Power, Cooling, Racking)
• A high-level understanding of enterprise infrastructure including:
• Operating systems (Unix, Windows, Mainframe)
• Storage (NFS, SAN, NAS, Filers)
• Databases (DB2, Sybase, GreenPlum)
• Web infrastructure (Load balancers, Treadmill, Web Proxies)
• Datacenters (Cooling, Power, Infrastructure)
• Networks (Switch, Router, DNS, DHCP, Firewalls)
• Virtualisation (Hypervisors)
• Authentication (Kerberos, Certificates/PKI, SiteMinder, LDAP, Active Directory)
• Cloud (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, Azure, AWS)

*Hybrid working - 3 days per week in London office*

*Shifts - 07:30 to 16:30 or 08:30 to 17:30*

*On call - once every 6 weeks*