Disaster Recovery and Major Incident Response Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as Active or Backup Responder on Duty (AROD/BROD) on a scheduled rotation for major incidents, declared disasters, and extended outages.
• Function as the single point of command and escalation during DR and major incidents in coordination with the Executive on Duty (EOD).
• Assess incident severity and determine when to escalate to disaster recovery activation in collaboration with IT EOD and business leadership.
• Cook up cross-functional response efforts involving infrastructure, application teams, cybersecurity, vendors, and business operations.
• Coordinate real-time incident coordination calls and ensure clear task assignment, escalation, and decision tracking.
• Oversee internal and external communications related to service outages, recovery progress, and restoration status.
• Ensure continuous 24/7 readiness by validating that playbooks, contact lists, tooling access, vendor support, and escalation paths are current, accessible, and executable at all times.
• Ensure effective shift handoffs, documentation continuity, and leadership coverage during prolonged or multi-day incidents.
• Own the activation and execution of disaster recovery plans and runbooks during declared events.
• Coordinate technical recovery activities across infrastructure, platform, and application teams.
• Ensure application recovery is validated by appropriate application and business owners prior to declaring service restoration.
• Maintain operational oversight for prolonged recovery efforts, including shift coverage, resource planning, and vendor engagement.
• Ensure recovery actions are executed in accordance with approved DR standards, policies, and tiering requirements.
• Partner with IT Operations, Infrastructure, Applications, and Cybersecurity teams to validate technical accuracy and operational effectiveness of disaster recovery and major incident playbooks.
• Support application tiering decisions and ensure recovery strategies align to business impact and risk tolerance.
• Lead the planning, execution, and facilitation of disaster recovery testing, tabletop exercises, and simulations; ensure findings are documented and tracked to closure.
• Ensure exercise outcomes, identified gaps, and remediation actions are documented, tracked, and resolved within defined timeframes.
• Ensure DR processes align with internal policies, regulatory requirements, and audit expectations.
• Lead the creation of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) documents and/or postmortem reviews following major incidents and disaster recovery events.
• Ensure lessons learned, control gaps, and process improvements are documented and assigned to accountable owners.
• Identify recurring incident patterns or recovery risks and recommend corrective actions.
• Develop and present actionable, data-driven recommendations to IT and business leadership to improve disaster recovery readiness, response effectiveness, and operational resilience, including recovery strategy enhancements, tooling gaps, staffing models, and escalation processes.
• Provide regular status updates and briefings to IT leadership, business partners, and governance committees.
• Escalate recovery risks, resource constraints, or unresolved issues to executive leadership as appropriate.
• Partner with business continuity leaders to ensure alignment between IT recovery and operational continuity procedures.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, Business Administration or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in IT operations, major incident management, disaster recovery, or service management.
• Strong demonstrated experience acting in an incident command or major incident leadership role.
• Strong understanding of: Disaster recovery and business continuity concepts, Application tiering and dependency management, Infrastructure and application recovery strategies, Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams during high-pressure incidents.
• Effective communication skills and executive-presence.
• This role holds operational command responsibility during declared disasters and major IT incidents.
• Afterhours, weekend, and holiday availability are essential functions of the role.
• Success requires the ability to drive execution, accountability, and remediation through influence across multiple teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, regulated, or audit-driven environments.
• Familiarity with ITIL, ISO 22301, NIST, or similar frameworks.
• Experience leading and supporting large, complex application portfolios or programs.
• Experience working with third-party vendors during recovery events.