Manager, Business Continuity Planning & Compliance

Role Overview

This role leads the technology resilience and business continuity programme for a large financial services group, making sure critical systems — especially core banking and tier-1 platforms — can survive and recover from outages, cyber-attacks, and regional disruptions. Day to day, you will set recovery strategies, design and run failover simulations, challenge architecture decisions that create single points of failure, and report resilience risk to senior committees. Your work directly determines how quickly the organisation can restore customer-facing services and maintain regulatory compliance when the unexpected happens.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and enforce the group-wide technology business continuity and operational resilience strategy, aligning it with ISO 22301, regional regulatory expectations such as CBK prudential guidelines, and modern cloud-native approaches — including automated DR failover and infrastructure as code for repeatable recovery.
• Partner with the cybersecurity function to design, test, and refine cyber recovery playbooks for destructive events like ransomware, using immutable backups and other safeguards to get systems back online quickly.
• Orchestrate multi-country disaster recovery and cyber resilience simulations for core banking and tier-1 applications, verifying that recovery time and recovery point objectives are actually met under realistic failure scenarios.
• Run tabletop crisis management exercises for technology leadership and facilitate IT DRP simulation drills that build muscle memory for incident response.
• Challenge enterprise architects and system owners on high-availability and redundancy designs, and mandate removal of single points of failure across physical data centres and multi-cloud or containerised environments.
• Lead business impact analyses and technology threat/vulnerability assessments to keep recovery priorities aligned with the most critical business outcomes.
• Audit the resilience of third-party technology vendors, SaaS/PaaS providers, and fintech partners, addressing supply chain risks and systemic concentration issues before they become disruptions.
• Create operational resilience dashboards and present BCM risk profiles, compliance status, and remediation progress to the Group Risk Committee and the Board, while tracking open findings to closure.

Requirements & Qualifications

• At least 5 years of hands-on experience in technology business continuity, disaster recovery, or operational resilience, preferably within banking or large financial services.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, information security, or a related technology field; a master’s degree in business or IT is strongly preferred.
• Professional certification in business continuity or resilience — CBCP, AMBCI, MBCI, or ISO 22301 Lead Implementer/Auditor.
• Additional governance or security certifications such as CISA, CISM, CISSP, CRISC, or ITIL v4.
• Deep understanding of RTO/RPO design, DR orchestration tools, cloud-native resilience patterns, and infrastructure-as-code recovery techniques.
• Hands-on experience planning and executing DR failover tests and tabletop exercises for mission-critical banking applications.
• Strong analytical skills to challenge architecture decisions and identify single points of failure in complex, multi-cloud or containerised environments.
• Excellent executive communication and reporting ability, with experience presenting risk and compliance topics to board-level audiences.