Senior Manager - Operational Resilience SME

We are seeking a strategically minded Operational Resilience Specialist to lead the next phase of our clients resilience journey — embedding, refining, and maturing their established framework.

This role is critical in driving cultural change, championing continuous improvement, and ensuring operational resilience remains a sustainable, value-adding capability across the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Evolve and mature the operational resilience strategy in line with the business’s long-term goals, regulatory developments, and market best practice.
• Own the resilience continuous improvement roadmap, aligning with internal audit, risk, IT, and third-party risk to close findings and uplift practices
• Act as a resilience thought leader, shaping the business narrative around resilience and influencing strategic decisions at senior levels.
• Ensure resilience is embedded in strategic planning, transformation programmes, outsourcing decisions, and operating model changes.
• Drive the embedding of operational resilience principles into day-to-day behaviors, business planning, and risk culture across all functions and geographies.
• Lead targeted campaigns and training to elevate understanding and ownership of resilience among senior leaders and operational teams.
• Conduct periodic maturity assessments, gap analyses and lessons learned exercises to identify and action improvement areas.
• Strengthen the effectiveness of existing processes such as impact tolerance testing, scenario exercises, and resilience metrics.
• Provide compelling insight and MI to executive stakeholders and board committees on resilience maturity, cultural embedding, and improvement outcomes.
• Serve as the key interface with internal and external stakeholders (e.g. auditors, regulators) on ongoing resilience progress.

Key Skills and Experience

• Strong expertise in operational resilience within a regulated financial services or insurance setting, with a post-implementation focus.
• Proven track record of influencing cultural change and embedding risk or resilience capabilities sustainably across business lines.
• Deep understanding of relevant European regulatory regimes (e.g. DORA, Solvency II, EIOPA) and industry standards.
• Demonstrated ability to drive strategic thinking, continuous improvement, and business engagement across complex organisational structures.
• Skilled communicator with the ability to influence, educate, and challenge constructively at all levels.

Desirable

• Background in strategy, business transformation, or operational risk with exposure to resilience themes.
• Experience in pan-European or multinational insurance environments.
• Professional qualifications such as MBCI, ISO 22301, IRM, or similar.