Incident Manager

Job Title: Incident Manager

Job Location: Central London, UK/ Onsite

Job Type: FTE

Job Description:

Role Summary

The Incident Manager owns end-to-end incident response for critical insurance systems and services, focusing on minimizing customer and business impact across all platforms. This role leads major incident handling, coordinates cross-functional and vendor teams, ensures regulatory and audit readiness, and drives continuous improvement to reduce recurrence and improve resilience.

Key Responsibilities

1. Lead major incident response and coordination across application teams, infrastructure, security, vendor partners, and business stakeholders to restore services quickly.

2. Act as the single point of contact for incident communications to senior leadership, business owners, and regulatory contacts when required.

3. Ensure timely incident logging, accurate impact assessment, prioritization, escalation, and closure according to SLAs and regulatory requirements.

4. Run post-incident reviews and root cause analyses, capture remediation actions, assign owners, and track closure to prevent recurrence.

5. Maintain and mature incident runbooks, playbooks, escalation matrices, and communication templates tailored to insurance processes (claims processing, policy issuance, billing interruptions).

6. Coordinate vendor and third-party responses, including cloud providers, core insurance platform vendors, and outsourcing partners.

7. Ensure incident management practices comply with insurance regulations, audit requirements, and internal risk controls.

8. Monitor incident metrics and trends, produce dashboards and executive briefings, and recommend improvements to reduce severity and frequency of incidents.

9. Support business continuity and disaster recovery plans, participate in tabletop exercises and major outage rehearsals.

10. Mentor and coach junior incident managers and on-call teams; promote a culture of blameless post-incident learning.

Required Skills and Competencies

1. Deep knowledge of ITSM frameworks (ITIL v4 and above recommended) and demonstrated experience in major incident management.

2. Proven experience coordinating complex, cross-functional incident responses and vendor management.

3. Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to explain technical impacts to non-technical senior stakeholders and regulators.

4. Strong analytical and decision-making skills under pressure; ability to prioritize competing demands during high-severity incidents.

5. Familiarity with common ITSM and incident tooling (ServiceNow)

6. Experience with cloud and legacy environments (public cloud providers, virtualized infrastructure, mainframe integrations).

7. Understanding of regulatory/compliance requirements relevant to insurance (audits, reporting obligations, data protection).

8. Leadership presence with experience driving actions across distributed teams without direct authority.

9. Must be well versed in capturing and reporting on popular KPI’s and SLA’s including MTTR etc.,

Experience & Qualifications

· More than 6 years’ experience in IT operations, incident management, or service management — typically 7+ years for a senior role in insurance.

· Demonstrated track record of leading high-severity incidents and reducing MTTR and incident recurrence.

· Experience working with vendors and third-party outsourcing arrangements common in insurance IT.

Certifications

· ITIL Foundation or ITIL v4 certification - Mandatory

· Project or program management certification (PMP, PRINCE2) advantageous.

· Security or cloud certifications (CISSP, CISM, AWS/Azure certifications) are a plus.