Incident Manager

Job Title: Incident & Release Manager (Banking Operations) Job Summary We are seeking an experienced Incident & Release Manager with over 7 years of IT service management background to join our dynamic banking technology team. In this role, you will be dual-hatted, driving both production stability and seamless software deployments for critical, high-availability financial applications. You will be responsible for leading the restoration of complex, high-priority service disruptions while simultaneously orchestrating the end-to-end release lifecycle, ensuring zero disruption to daily banking operations and strict compliance with financial regulations. Key Responsibilities Incident & Problem Management (50%) Major Incident Response: Lead and orchestrate the restoration of high-priority (P1/P2) incidents affecting critical core banking networks, payment gateways, and customer-facing channels. Crisis Coordination: Convene and chair emergency technical bridge calls with cross-functional infrastructure, security, application development, and third-party vendor teams. Stakeholder Communication: Draft and distribute timely, precise executive-level incident alerts and progress updates to business leadership and operational heads. Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Facilitate post-incident reviews, drive thorough problem management workflows, and track preventative actions to eliminate recurring failures. SLA Compliance: Monitor and enforce strict Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) metrics aligned with banking performance standards and regulatory guidelines. Release & Change Management (50%) Deployment Orchestration: Oversee the end-to-end software release lifecycle, managing deployment schedules across staging, pre-production, and live banking environments. Risk Assessment: Evaluate change management requests, analyze cross-system dependencies, and conduct strict risk/impact assessments to prevent deployment-related outages. Go/No-Go Leadership: Chair Change Advisory Board (CAB) and release readiness reviews with product owners, QA leads, and infrastructure teams to secure formal approvals. Rollback Planning: Ensure every deployment package includes comprehensive, validated back-out strategies and automated sanity-testing scripts. Audit & Compliance: Maintain meticulous documentation of release manifests, approvals, and testing sign-offs to satisfy stringent internal and banking regulatory audits. Required Qualifications & Technical Skills Experience: Minimum 7+ years of professional experience in IT Service Management (ITSM), specifically running Incident and Release management functions. Industry Domain: Proven track record working within a Banking, Financial Services, or Insurance (BFSI) domain handling high-volume transaction systems. Methodologies: Strong operational mastery of ITIL v3 / ITIL 4 frameworks (Certification is highly preferred) alongside familiarity with Agile/Scrum delivery models. ITSM & Automation Tools: Advanced proficiency using enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, Remedy, or equivalent tracking tools. CI/CD Awareness: Conceptual or hands-on understanding of DevOps release pipelines, automation tools (Jenkins, GitLab), and cloud environments (AWS/Azure). Availability: Readiness to participate in an on-call rotation schedule to support critical weekend deployment windows and after-hours major incidents.