Crisis & Incident Manager

Crisis Manager

Position Summary
Responsible for supporting the enhancement, preparedness, and execution of the enterprise crisis management program, ensuring executive readiness and effective response to wide scale incidents affecting colleagues, customers, and the Citizens brand. This role owns administration of the crisis management program, leads development of crisis plans and playbooks, and designs and facilitates leadership tabletop exercises. Partners closely across technology, operations, risk, compliance, and business lines to strengthen enterprise resilience for events impacting customers, funds movement, confidentiality, and brand trust. This role also leads full implementation and ongoing management of an automated crisis microsimulation platform used enterprise wide.

Key Responsibilities
• Support and enhance the enterprise crisis management program, including governance, defined roles such as Crisis Management Team and Major Incident Management, escalation paths, and executive decision cadence
• Develop, maintain, and socialize crisis management plans, playbooks, call trees, and communications templates for high impact incidents including digital banking outages, payments disruptions, branch and ATM impacts, cyber and fraud events, non technology incidents, and severe weather
• Coordinate and lead crisis response activities including activation, situational assessment, customer and financial impact analysis, prioritization, and executive briefings
• Facilitate crisis bridge calls and leadership updates, document decisions, risks, and action items, and ensure timely and auditable communications
• Partner with Business Continuity, Operational Resilience, IT, Information Security, Fraud, Payments, Branch Operations, Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Corporate Communications to align response strategies and customer messaging
• Design, plan, and deliver tabletop exercises and simulations to validate readiness for banking specific scenarios such as cyber events, third party disruptions, liquidity related operational impacts, fraud events, and facility or branch closures
• Create exercise materials including objectives aligned to control testing, scenarios and injects, controller guides, participant materials, evaluation criteria, and after action templates suitable for audit and regulatory review
• Maintain crisis tools including mass notification platforms and collaboration channels, ensuring distribution lists and on call rosters are accurate and regularly tested
• Deliver training for crisis leaders and responders covering decision making, customer communications, and regulatory notification considerations
• Support audits and regulatory examinations by providing crisis and exercise evidence and documentation aligned to expectations
• Lead implementation, ongoing management, and enterprise adoption of the automated crisis management platform iluminr, serving as primary vendor point of contact and ensuring training and effective use across the enterprise

Required Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree preferred or equivalent relevant experience
• At least 3 years of experience in crisis management, major incident management, business continuity, operational resilience, security, cyber, IT service management, or risk management, preferably within banking or other regulated financial services
• Working knowledge of banking risk and compliance considerations including customer data protection, third party risk, and audit and exam preparedness
• Demonstrated experience facilitating tabletop exercises and leading structured after action reviews
• Proven ability to lead under pressure, synthesize incomplete information, and drive timely executive decisions
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with experience briefing senior leaders
• Demonstrated ability to work cross functionally and influence without direct authority
• Ability to handle sensitive and confidential information with discretion

Preferred Qualifications
• Experience coordinating customer and stakeholder communications during incidents impacting banking service availability, including contact center, branch, and digital channel messaging
• Experience supporting audit and regulatory exam requests and producing defensible evidence packages within financial services
• Familiarity with incident command concepts or major incident management practices
• Experience designing complex, multi threaded crisis scenarios spanning cyber, operational disruption, safety, supply chain, and reputational events
• Understanding of payments and core banking dependencies such as card networks, ACH, wires, and online banking platforms and how outages translate to customer impact
• Experience with mass notification and incident or crisis tooling such as Everbridge, ServiceNow, Jira, Teams, or Zoom

Skills and Competencies
• Facilitation skills to guide diverse groups through structured discussions and keep exercises aligned to objectives
• Scenario design expertise with ability to build realistic narratives tied to business processes and decision points
• Program management capability including planning, stakeholder coordination, action tracking, and continuous improvement
• Analytical thinking to identify gaps, root causes, and systemic improvements emerging from incidents and exercises
• Clear and concise communication for status updates, executive briefings, and written deliverables
• Strong risk and regulatory mindset with ability to translate incidents into operational risk, customer harm considerations, and compliance requirements
• Leadership under pressure with ability to prioritize effectively and enable execution
• Strong documentation discipline with version control for plans, playbooks, and evidence artifacts