A major financial institution's Service Availability and Resilience function runs the end-to-end IT continuity and disaster recovery programme for critical banking services. This role exists to coordinate and execute IT continuity and E2E exercises, using ServiceNow and MS Office to manage schedules, runbooks and post-exercise reporting, and to ensure readiness across infrastructure components and application teams.
The mission
The team ensures maximum availability of core IT services by preparing, running and following up on full-scale continuity exercises and disaster recovery (DR) plans. The technical landscape covers application stacks and infrastructure across two data centres, with regulatory expectations from European and national supervisors and internal group policies. You will join a multidisciplinary team of six inside a department of 25 people responsible for service resilience and exercise governance.
On a day-to-day basis you coordinate end-to-end IT continuity exercises from scoping to closure. You will define applications in scope with tribe resiliency contacts, validate Change Review Board (CRB) readiness, lead detailed capacity studies for involved infrastructure, collect inputs for the Master Run Book, and produce the post-exercise reports and remediation tracking. You will also act as facilitator during execution windows, which take place outside business hours several times per year.
Your responsibilities
- Coordinate end-to-end IT continuity and disaster recovery exercises, ensuring exercises meet regulatory and internal readiness criteria
- Validate CRB readiness and run detailed capacity studies for all infrastructure components involved in each exercise
- Produce clear post-exercise reports and track remediation actions until closure, improving measurable recovery times
- Maintain the Master Run Book (MRB) and perform master run book maintenance to keep procedures and contacts current
- Facilitate exercise execution on-site during scheduled nights and weekends and manage real-time issues with technical owners
- Liaise with tribe resiliency contacts, application teams and group stakeholders to plan scope, identify risks and define mitigation plans
Your profile
Essential skills
- 3 to 5 years of experience coordinating IT continuity or disaster recovery exercises
- Practical experience with ServiceNow for incident and exercise tracking and strong skills in MS Office (Excel, Word, PowerPoint) for reporting
- Proven ability to read technical inventories and work with infrastructure teams under pressure
- Strong stakeholder management, facilitation and decision making during live exercises
- Availability to participate in night and weekend exercise windows
Preferred skills
- Hands-on familiarity with Windows, Linux, mainframe and cloud environments
- Experience with application development, databases and middleware in the context of recovery scenarios
- Experience producing capacity studies, runbook authoring and DR plan optimisation
Languages
- English, C1
- Dutch, B1 (advantage)
- French, B1 (advantage)
Education
- Bachelor degree in IT, engineering or equivalent professional experience