Incident Operations Lead

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for an Incident Operations Lead based in Switzerland.

As an Incident Operations Lead, you will build and lead the function responsible for managing the most critical incidents across a complex, globally distributed technology environment. You will establish the operating model, severity framework, escalation paths, and 24x7 follow-the-sun coverage needed to respond effectively under pressure. The role sits at the intersection of engineering, SRE, Risk, communications, and reliability teams, ensuring every incident is managed with clarity and discipline. You will lead a distributed team of Incident Commanders while continuously improving response processes, metrics, and operational readiness. A major part of the role will be turning incident learnings into measurable reliability improvements and scalable operating practices. You will also shape the use of AI-powered automation to reduce operational toil and make incident management faster, safer, and more consistent.

Accountabilities

• Build and lead a dedicated Incident Operations function responsible for coordinating the organization’s most critical incidents.
• Recruit, develop, and certify Incident Commanders and establish a 24x7 follow-the-sun rotation across APAC, EMEA, and AMER.
• Maintain effective regional handoffs and participate in the incident command roster to remain closely connected to operational realities.
• Develop and run game days, tabletop exercises, simulations, and certification programs to keep responders prepared for high-severity events.
• Establish a blameless incident culture focused on identifying process and system improvements rather than individual fault.
• Own the incident severity model in partnership with Risk, ensuring severity levels appropriately reflect financial and regulatory materiality.
• Define and maintain escalation paths, response thresholds, leadership escalation criteria, and procedures for unanswered alerts or pages.
• Keep the service catalogue and service ownership information accurate and actionable so teams can quickly identify the right technical owners during incidents.
• Coordinate the operational bridge between engineering and technical support teams resolving incidents and partner-facing communications teams providing customer updates.
• Establish clear communication channels, provide accurate incident facts, and maintain appropriate update cadences throughout major incidents.
• Lead post-incident retrospectives in collaboration with SRE and ensure follow-up actions are documented, assigned, prioritized, and delivered within defined service levels.
• Track overdue post-incident reviews and actions by team and incident, ensuring every outstanding item has a clear next step and owner.
• Define and maintain trusted operational KPIs, including time to respond and time to mitigate, with clear definitions and reliable underlying data.
• Establish defensible performance baselines before setting improvement targets and use severity-based analysis to drive continuous improvement.
• Build incident-management processes as scalable, documented, versioned operating products that can support significant organizational growth.
• Lead an AI and agentic automation roadmap covering incident setup, timeline generation, RCA drafting, action tracking, update reminders, and review follow-ups.
• Establish clear boundaries for automated workflows, defining where AI agents can operate independently and where human Incident Commander judgment remains essential.
• Translate incident learnings into concise, actionable guidance and distribute them across engineering teams so lessons from individual failures can drive broader organizational improvement.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience in production engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, technical operations, or a closely related technical discipline.
• Proven hands-on experience commanding high-severity or major production incidents.
• Demonstrated experience building or standing up an incident command or major-incident management function, rather than only participating in an established process.
• Experience designing severity models, escalation frameworks, incident-response processes, and operational governance.
• Proven ability to lead distributed teams across multiple time zones and operate a 24x7 on-call or follow-the-sun rotation.
• Strong influence and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to drive action from engineers and teams outside your direct reporting line.
• Confident judgment when making and defending severity or escalation decisions during high-pressure situations.
• Strong understanding of reliability metrics and the ability to distinguish improvements in measured performance from genuine improvements in operational outcomes.
• Excellent scope discipline and the ability to establish clear ownership boundaries while ensuring issues are routed without creating operational gaps.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to maintain calm and clarity during incident bridges.
• Ability to communicate effectively with senior and executive stakeholders during high-impact incidents without minimizing or overstating the situation.
• Strong understanding of FinTech environments and the trust, reliability, and operational requirements associated with API-driven financial platforms.
• Experience using AI or agentic automation to reduce operational toil and improve incident-management workflows.
• Excellent organizational skills and a strong focus on documentation, process quality, and continuous improvement.
• Formal incident command, ITIL, Major Incident Management, or crisis-management training is a plus.
• Experience running certification programs, game days, simulations, or operational drills is highly valued.
• Familiarity with modern incident-management and on-call platforms is advantageous.
• Experience building and maintaining service catalogues or service ownership registries is a plus.
• Experience partnering with program management or reliability teams to convert incident follow-ups into funded improvement initiatives is desirable.
• Familiarity with regulatory incident-reporting obligations such as DORA, Reg SCI, FINRA, or equivalent frameworks is advantageous.
• Experience in online securities trading, capital markets, or another regulated and market-hours-sensitive environment is a plus.
• Experience deploying an incident-management operating model across multiple regions or entities is advantageous.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary.
• Stock options.
• Health benefits.
• One-time USD $500 home-office setup allowance for new hires.
• USD $150 monthly stipend provided through a company card.
• Opportunity to work in a globally distributed environment.
• Exposure to a highly technical, reliability-focused operating environment.
• Opportunity to lead and shape a critical operational function from the ground up.
• Significant scope to influence incident management, reliability, automation, and organizational readiness.
• Opportunity to work cross-functionally with engineering, SRE, Risk, communications, and reliability teams.
• Opportunity to develop and implement AI-powered operational workflows and automation.
• Inclusive environment that values curiosity, empathy, accountability, and diverse perspectives.