Senior Major Incident Commander - IT Operations

Sr. Manager - Major Incident Commander About Northern Trust As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the worlds most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions. Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide. With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the worlds most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. Job Title Major Incident Commander (Production Assurance Operations) Role Summary The Major Incident Commander (MIC) is an Accountable leader who is responsible for directing the endtoend response to highseverity, businessimpacting technology incidents . The role owns command, coordination, driving decisionmaking, and executive communication during major incidents, ensuring rapid service restoration, minimal business impact, and disciplined postincident learning . The MIC does not fix systems directly . Instead, they lead through influence , orchestrating crossfunctional technical teams (SRE, Infrastructure, Application, Network, Cloud, Security, Vendors) under intense time pressure while maintaining clear situational awareness and communication. Key Responsibilities 1. Incident Command & Leadership Act as the designated Incident Commander for all declared Major / Severity1 / Priority1 incidents. Rapidly assess impact, scope, and severity; formally declare major incidents and activate response protocols. Establish and maintain clear command structure , roles, and accountability throughout the incident lifecycle. Drive incident progression from detection through mitigation, restoration, and closure. 2. Coordination & Execution Lead and control incident bridges / war rooms, ensuring focus, discipline, and forward momentum. Mobilize the right technical resources across infrastructure, applications, cloud, network, security, and thirdparty vendors. Prevent duplicated effort, conflicting actions, and unmanaged escalations. Make timecritical decisions (rollback, failover, isolation, degradation) based on technical input and business risk. Drive Incident Managers and Incident analysts for fire calling, stakeholder management, bridge and communication management 3. Stakeholder & Executive Communication Own all major incident communications endtoend Translate complex technical situations into clear business impact statements for senior leadership. Have straight line communication with the CXO group on the impact, progress and status Provide structured, timebound updates to executives, service owners, and business stakeholders. Ensure consistency across incident bridges, leadership updates, and customerfacing communications where applicable. 4. Governance, Process & Control Ensure incidents are managed in line with ITIL / SRE / internal Major Incident Management frameworks . Enforce escalation paths, decision rights, and incident classification standards. Coordinate emergency changes and risk acceptance where required during live incidents. Maintain accurate incident timelines, actions, and decisions for audit and review. 5. PostIncident Review & Continuous Improvement Integrate with postincident reviews (RCAs) for all major incidents. Contribute to highquality root cause analysis using structured methods (5 Whys, Fishbone, KT, FMEA). Flash system weaknesses, recurring patterns, and resilience gaps. Operating Model Part of a Production Assurance/ Incident Management Operations function. Participation in oncall or major incident rotation , including offhours and weekends. Works closely with Service Owners, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Vendor Management teams Required Experience & Skills Core Experience Overall 18+ years of IT-BFSI Delivery Proven experience acting as Incident Commander or Major Incident Lead in complex, 247 enterprise environments. 10+ years in IT Operations, SRE, Incident Management, or Production Support roles. Handson exposure to missioncritical systems (cloud, infrastructure, applications, networks, identity, databases). Technical & Operational Knowledge Strong understanding of modern distributed systems and failure modes. Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP) and cloudnative architectures. Working knowledge of monitoring, alerting, and observability tools (e.g., Dynatrace, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana). Experience with ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Remedy, Jira Service Management, or equivalent). Strong understanding of Custody, Trade and Payments Operations will be an added advantage Leadership & Behavioral Competencies Demonstrates strong situational control and .