Incident Manager

Role Summary

The Incident Manager leads the end-to-end command and control of high-impact technology incidents. Acting as the single point of accountability during an active Major Incident, this role establishes structure, drives cross-functional coordination and decision-making, maintains focus on service restoration, and ensures timely, accurate communication. The Incident Manager also safeguards audit-ready documentation, validates restoration and impact, and enables a clean transition into post-incident review and Problem Management.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Major Incident response from declaration through service restoration, stabilization, documentation, and operational handoff.
• Own command and control of incident bridges by setting objectives, maintaining pace and bridge discipline, summarizing status, and driving clear next actions.
• Confirm that incident priority reflects business impact and urgency; escalate to technology and business leadership when required.
• Coordinate application, infrastructure, network, security, vendor, service management, and business teams to accelerate diagnosis and recovery.
• Ensure the correct technical resources and decision-makers are engaged; escalate non-response, unclear ownership, or stalled troubleshooting.
• Balance restoration speed with operational and business risk, including coordination of emergency change approvals and rollback decisions.
• Direct internal and executive-level communications, ensuring updates clearly state impact, actions, progress, risk, and next steps.
• Ensure incident records and timelines capture decisions, actions, ownership, impact assessments, vendor engagement, and restoration evidence to audit-ready standards.
• Validate that service has been restored, the impact window is accurately assessed, and any remaining risk or monitoring requirement has an owner.
• Determine follow-up needs, including reconvene sessions, post-incident review inputs, corrective actions, and handoff to Problem Management.
• Coach ECC Analysts and less-experienced incident leaders on bridge execution, communications, documentation, and escalation practices.
• Identify and implement improvements to incident processes, playbooks, tooling, AI-assisted workflows, and automation that reduce manual effort and improve consistency.
• Participate in relevant on-call or rota coverage for Major Incident response.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years of experience in enterprise IT operations, production support, service management, or incident management within high-availability environments.
• Demonstrated experience leading Major Incident bridges and coordinating P1/P2 or equivalent high-severity incidents.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL-aligned Incident, Major Incident, Change, Problem, and post-incident review practices.
• Experience with ServiceNow and enterprise monitoring, observability, collaboration, and notification tools; Splunk experience is strongly preferred.
• Broad understanding of enterprise applications, cloud and on-premises infrastructure, networking, middleware, and production support models.
• Ability to lead calmly and decisively in high-pressure scenarios with incomplete or rapidly changing information.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, including executive summaries and clear technical-to-business translation.
• Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, independent judgment, and disciplined follow-through.
• Proven ability to influence and coordinate teams without relying on direct reporting authority.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL Foundation or advanced IT service management certification.
• Experience with xMatters or equivalent paging and escalation platforms, Microsoft Teams incident collaboration, and structured incident timelines.
• Experience with AI-enabled operations, workflow automation, incident documentation automation, or operational intelligence.
• Experience working across global teams, time zones, vendors, and business stakeholders