IT Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Manager

We have an exciting opportunity for an IT Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Manager to join the IT Operations team at Yorkshire Water and be a part of helping Yorkshire Water to provide the best service to our customers.

Location: West Yorkshire. This role will initially be based in Bradford but we’re moving our office to Leeds Valley Park in summer 2026, so you’ll be based there in the future – Hybrid Working (1‑2 days in the office a week – Bradford/Leeds). Work type: Permanent. 37 hours per week, Monday‑Friday.

What we do: Everyone has an idea of what a water company does. Here in Yorkshire, we make sure that over 5.4 million people living in the region and the millions of people who visit our region each year can rely on our services, and have clean and safe drinking water on tap and that their wastewater is taken away. But for us, it’s so much more than this. We look after communities, protect the environment, and plan to look after Yorkshire’s water, today, tomorrow 24/7, 365 days a year. We provide essential water and wastewater services to every corner of the Yorkshire region, and play a key role in the region’s health, wellbeing, and prosperity. New environmental legislation, unprecedented levels of investment and changing expectations from customers means that this is an exciting time to discover opportunities within the water industry.

The IT Operations are a key part of how we plan to meet the changing expectations of customers and regulators. This is a fantastic opportunity to play a key role in strengthening our operational resilience and protecting critical business services. You’ll work with a wide range of stakeholders across the organisation, leading impactful DR and Business Continuity initiatives that make a real difference. If you’re passionate about resilience, enjoy solving complex challenges and want a role where your expertise will have genuine visibility and impact, we’d love to hear from you.

Where you fit in: As our IT Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Manager you will:

• Take ownership of the organisation’s Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) capability, driving the development, maintenance and continuous improvement of plans, runbooks, recovery procedures and resilience documentation.
• Play a pivotal role in strengthening operational resilience by ensuring DR and BC frameworks are aligned to organisational risk appetite, regulatory expectations and industry best practice.
• Lead the delivery of engaging and impactful DR testing activities, including failover simulations, restoration testing and tabletop exercises, ensuring the business is prepared to respond confidently to disruption.
• Act as a trusted expert and advisor across the business, partnering with IT Operations, Service Operations, system owners and business stakeholders to embed resilience into everyday operations.
• Ensure recovery strategies align with Business Impact Analysis (BIA) outcomes, Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Maximum Acceptable Outage (MAO) and key business continuity requirements.
• Drive accountability by maintaining clear roles, responsibilities and escalation paths across IT and business teams, ensuring a coordinated and effective response during incidents.
• Review test outcomes, identify lessons learned and champion continuous improvement initiatives that enhance resilience and recovery capability across the organisation.
• Monitor and assess operational risks relating to system availability, cyber resilience and business continuity, proactively identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement.
• Own and maintain high‑quality DR and BC documentation, ensuring it accurately reflects current technologies, services, dependencies and organisational structures.
• Collaborate with business units to ensure continuity plans are realistic, effective and fully aligned to IT recovery capabilities and operational priorities.
• Support and facilitate cross‑functional workshops to gather critical information on services, processes, ownership and continuity dependencies.
• Provide meaningful governance, reporting and assurance to senior stakeholders on DR and BC readiness, resilience posture, identified risks and remediation activity.
• Ensure incident response, cyber resilience and major incident management processes integrate seamlessly with the wider DR and BC framework.
• Act as a key leader during major incidents and recovery events, helping to coordinate response activities and drive business recovery outcomes.
• Promote a strong culture of resilience across the organisation by increasing awareness and understanding of DR and BC responsibilities at all levels.

What skills & qualifications you will need:

• Experience managing or supporting IT Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) programmes in complex environments.
• Strong understanding of DR and BC principles, including BIAs, RTOs, MAO, MBCO and resilience frameworks.
• Hands‑on experience delivering DR tests, restoration exercises and continuity drills.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience producing governance documentation and presenting to senior leaders.
• A proactive, solutions‑focused approach with the ability to manage risk and drive continuous improvement.
• Experience supporting incident response, crisis management and cross‑functional coordination.
• A good technical understanding of infrastructure, cloud platforms, backup and recovery technologies.
• Knowledge of industry standards such as ITIL, ISO 22301, ISO 27001 would be advantageous.
• Experience working within hybrid‑cloud, highly regulated or critical infrastructure environments is desirable.
• The ability to collaborate effectively with internal teams, vendors and service providers to strengthen organisational resilience.

Closing date: The closing date for this advert is the 30th of June 2026.