Head of Cyber Incident Management in London

The Role

Canopius is a market‑leading cyber insurer with an established, in‑house Cyber Incident Management Team that supports clients during highly stressful and time‑critical situations. The Global Head of Incident Response is responsible for setting the strategic direction, standards, and operating model for incident management across Canopius globally.

This role leads teams across the UK, APAC and North America, ensuring a consistent, high‑quality incident experience for policyholders, aligned to Claims, Underwriting, and the broader cyber strategy. You will balance client service excellence, operational rigour, and commercial awareness, while building a high‑performing global team.

You will act as the senior owner of incident management practices, vendor engagement, and performance, ensuring Canopius delivers a coordinated, empathetic, and effective response to cyber incidents worldwide.

Responsibilities will include:

Set the global standard for incident management

• Define and own global best practices, operating standards, and service expectations for cyber incident response.
• Ensure consistent delivery against SLAs, service quality measures, and compliance requirements in partnership with Claims and Underwriting.
• Act as the senior escalation point for complex, sensitive, or high‑severity incidents.

Lead and develop global teams

• Manage and develop Cyber Incident Management teams across the UK, APAC, and North America.
• Build a cohesive, follow‑the‑sun operating model with strong handovers and clear accountability.
• Set culture, expectations, and development pathways for incident managers globally.

Maintain strategic vendor and panel

• Collaborate with Procurement team to refine the performance framework for incident response vendors (forensics, legal, PR, IR firms, and specialist advisors).
• Gather structured feedback from responders and Claims on vendor engagement and outcomes.
• Partner with Procurement to manage vendor relationships, performance review, and panel evolution.

Partner with Underwriting, Claims, and Analytics

• Understand underwriting requirements and ensure incident insights meaningfully inform risk selection, portfolio management, and product development.
• Work closely with Claims to ensure smooth coverage confirmation, escalation handling, and claim progression during live incidents.
• Champion the effective use of incident data to inform analytics, trends, and strategic decision‑making.

Evolve the Incident Management offering

• Lead continuous improvement of playbooks, workflows, and tooling.
• Ensure lessons learned from real incidents translate into service enhancements and client preparedness initiatives.
• Support development of client‑facing content, preparedness sessions, and executive simulations.

Skills & Experience:

• Proven experience leading teams in incident management, cyber response, claims, or crisis‑driven professional services environments.
• Strong people leadership and global team management experience across multiple regions and time zones.
• Experience managing complex operational services with external vendor ecosystems.
• Cybersecurity experience, particularly managing or overseeing incident response, is highly advantageous (hands‑on technical expertise is not required).
• Strong project and programme management skills, with the ability to bring structure to fast‑moving, high‑pressure situations.
• Clear, confident communicator able to engage credibly with clients, vendors, and senior internal stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of how data and insights can be used to improve service delivery, performance management, and strategic decision‑making.
• High judgement, empathy, and composure under pressure, with a strong service mindset.

Competencies:

Leading Change

Plans, implements and embeds organisational changes across the region and guides stakeholders through changes to processes, technologies, systems, or strategies, ensuring changes are successful and well received.

Leading Teams

Motivates, guides and empowers others to collectively meet current and future business needs. Sets clear performance expectations and utilises team members’ capacity, skills and potential effectively.

Stakeholder engagement

Cultivates and maintains positive relationships with relevant internal or external stakeholders, effectively involving and communicating with them to drive collaboration, support, and alignment towards shared goals.

Collaboration and teamwork:

Works effectively with team, project or other work groups or those outside formal line of authority to accomplish goals. Actively participates as a member of a team; develops and builds cohesive team relations to produce required outputs; possesses knowledge and understanding of colleagues work.

Adapting to change:

Adjusts thoughts, feelings, and behaviours to handle new, challenging, or complex situations; embracing change as a growth opportunity when working within new work structures, processes, regulations, or requirements.

Continuous Improvement

Analyses current and future state business requirements and identify strategies to continuously improve products, services or processes. Guide and inspire others to achieve results to enhance efficiency, quality and consistency.

Innovation

Creates, develops and implements new ideas to enhance new or improved processes, systems, solutions, products or services; tries different and novel ways to deal with problems and opportunities.

Resilience

The ability to cope with and recover from setbacks, challenges or difficulty. Persevering even under pressure or crisis situations and uses ways that foster strength and growth, often emerging stronger than before.

Future Focused

Anticipates changes in regulations, technology and client needs, proactively responding to key trends happening in the industry. Thinks about the future through identifying opportunities and obstacles whilst planning effectively.