Incident Manager in London

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

• Lead major incident response and coordination across application teams, infrastructure, security, vendor partners, and business stakeholders to restore services quickly.
• Act as the single point of contact for incident communications to senior leadership, business owners, and regulatory contacts when required.
• Ensure timely incident logging, accurate impact assessment, prioritisation, escalation, and closure according to SLAs and regulatory requirements.
• Run post-incident reviews and root cause analyses, capture remediation actions, assign owners, and track closure to prevent recurrence.
• Maintain and mature incident runbooks, playbooks, escalation matrices, and communication templates tailored to insurance processes (claims processing, policy issuance, billing interruptions).
• Coordinate vendor and third-party responses, including cloud providers, core insurance platform vendors, and outsourcing partners.
• Ensure incident management practices comply with insurance regulations, audit requirements, and internal risk controls.
• Monitor incident metrics and trends, produce dashboards and executive briefings, and recommend improvements to reduce severity and frequency of incidents.
• Support business continuity and disaster recovery plans, participate in tabletop exercises and major outage rehearsals.
• Mentor and coach junior incident managers and on-call teams; promote a culture of blameless post-incident learning.

Required Skills and Competencies

• Deep knowledge of ITSM frameworks (ITIL v4 and above recommended) and demonstrated experience in major incident management.
• Proven experience coordinating complex, cross-functional incident responses and vendor management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to explain technical impacts to non-technical senior stakeholders and regulators.
• Strong analytical and decision-making skills under pressure; ability to prioritise competing demands during high-severity incidents.
• Familiarity with common ITSM and incident tooling (ServiceNow).
• Experience with cloud and legacy environments (public cloud providers, virtualised infrastructure, mainframe integrations).
• Understanding of regulatory/compliance requirements relevant to insurance (audits, reporting obligations, data protection).
• Leadership presence with experience driving actions across distributed teams without direct authority.
• Must be well versed in capturing and reporting on popular KPIs and SLAs 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.