Major Incident Manager

About the Role

This position enhances the operational reliability, resilience, and stability of enterprise IT services through effective Major Incident Management practices. The role is responsible for leading the response to high-impact incidents, minimizing business disruption, and restoring service as quickly as possible. It facilitates the development and maturity of IT service management capabilities by driving continuous improvement across incident, problem, and change processes, and serves as a key technical and process leader during critical events.

Responsibilities

• Leads the end-to-end lifecycle of major incidents, including detection, prioritization, escalation, coordination, and resolution.
• Drives continuous improvement of incident management processes, runbooks, and response frameworks to enhance operational effectiveness.
• Conducts post-incident reviews (PIRs) to identify root causes and preventative measures.
• Ensures incidents, problems, and associated changes are managed efficiently while maintaining service levels across platforms.
• Acts as Incident Commander during major incidents, coordinating cross-functional technical teams, vendors, and stakeholders to rapidly restore service.
• Establishes clear roles, timelines, and action plans during incident bridges; removes blockers and ensures timely decision-making under pressure.
• Documents incidents, produces executive-level reports, and tracks key performance metrics such as MTTR, MTTD, incident volume, and SLA adherence.
• Monitors trends and provides data-driven insights to improve service reliability and reduce recurring issues.
• Partners with infrastructure, application, cybersecurity, and business teams to drive swift resolution of major incidents and improve long-term service resilience.
• Collaborates with Problem Management to ensure root cause analysis is completed and corrective actions are tracked.
• Supports Change Management to reduce incident risk from changes.
• Provides clear, concise, and timely communication to stakeholders at all levels during major incidents, including executive leadership.
• Publishes incident summaries, status updates, and post-incident reports.
• Ensures communication standards are met during high-pressure scenarios with a focus on transparency and business impact.
• Ensures adherence to ITIL and organizational ITSM standards; supports audit and compliance requirements related to incident and change management processes.
• Maintains documentation, playbooks, and escalation procedures.
• Leads or supports training for IT teams on incident response procedures, tools, and best practices.
• Promotes a culture of operational excellence and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree and 4 years of experience in Information Technology System Engineering, or High School Diploma or GED and 8 years of experience in Information Technology System Engineering.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in Major Incident Management or Incident Command roles in a large enterprise environment.
• Proven ability to lead severity 1 / critical outages affecting customer-facing or mission-critical systems.
• Strong experience with ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, or similar).
• Demonstrated success in reducing MTTR and improving incident response maturity.
• Experience facilitating post-incident reviews (PIRs) and driving root cause resolution through Problem Management.
• Ability to manage high-pressure situations, make rapid decisions, and coordinate distributed teams.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, applications, cloud platforms, and networking concepts.
• Excellent executive communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Familiarity with SRE principles, observability tools, and event management frameworks is a plus.

Preferred Qualifications

• ITSM Process Management experience (Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change, or other relevant ITSM/ESM processes).
• ITIL Certification (v3 or v4).
• Six Sigma (Green Belt or higher).

Benefits

First Citizens Bank offers a competitive, thoughtfully designed benefits program to meet the needs of associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.