Major Incident Management Lead in Coventry

The Lead Major Incident Manager provides authoritative command, leadership, and assurance for the most severe and business critical incidents impacting customers, colleagues, or regulatory obligations across the Group. Responsible for taking control of high impacting customer, business or colleague incidents, driving fast resolution and minimizing disruption to customers. This is a senior high-pressure role that requires a level of technical understanding, leadership and communication. You will lead the end-to-end management of major incidents, ensure timely resolution whilst maintaining clear communication with stakeholders and 3rd party suppliers.

Operating as the incident commander of last resort, this role takes control during high‐risk, multi‐tower, or supplier‐impacted incidents where senior stakeholder confidence and service reputation are at risk. The role ensures rapid stabilisation of live incidents, maintains clear executive-level communication and governance, and constructively challenges technical proposals where resolution actions introduce new or disproportionate risk.

In addition to real‐time command, the Lead Major Incident Manager acts as a coach and mentor to other Major Incident Managers, shaping capability, behaviours, and confidence under pressure. They play a key role in developing runbooks, playbooks, training, and escalation models to continuously strengthen organisational incident readiness. This is a senior leadership role, aligned to the organisation’s leadership capability framework, requiring calm authority, strong judgement, and the ability to create psychological safety while driving decisive outcomes.

We operate a function-led hybrid working model, with an expectation of 2–3 days per week on site. The role includes participation in an out-of-hours on-call rota and requires flexibility to travel to other locations for key meetings and collaborative activities, in line with business needs. The position can be based in either Coventry or Manchester.

You will be a composed and credible incident leader who thrives in complex, high‐pressure environments and is trusted by senior stakeholders to take control when it matters most. You adopt a servant‐leader mindset, prioritising customer outcomes, team effectiveness, and organisational resilience over hierarchy. You instinctively balance pace with control and are confident stepping in, stepping back, and coaching others in live situations.

For this role you’ll need to have:

• Experience in one or more of the following: Major Incident Management, Operations Command / Control or Senior Incident Management Roles.
• Strong experience operating within complex, multi‐supplier environments, Proven experience commanding severe, high‐impact Major Incidents.
• ITIL certified or able to demonstrate equivalent practical experience.
• ITIL 4 Foundation & one or more of the following, ITIL 4 Specialist: Create, Deliver & Support, ITIL 4 Strategist: Direct, Plan & Improve.
• Proven record of mentoring and developing junior team members.
• Essential experience of working in a complex, pressurised production environment in the Banking industry.

Experience in these areas would be helpful:

• Experience within regulated and/or customer‐critical environments.
• Working in Agile/Devops/SAFe models would be an advantage.

This is a permanent role and is at P3 Lead Professional / Technical grade.

Flexibility and why it matters. We understand the need for flexibility, so wherever possible, we’ll consider alternative working patterns. Have a chat with us before you apply to see what the possibilities are for this role.

Proud to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer. We’re proud to offer an interview or assessment to every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for our vacancies.