Director Major Incident & Problem Management

Cencora's infrastructure organization is transforming to a product-based operating model in which product teams build and run what they own (“You Build It, You Run It”). Two capabilities make that model safe at enterprise scale: Major Incident Management, which commands the response when critical services fail, and Problem Management, which makes sure nothing is learned twice the hard way. The Director, Major Incident & Problem Management builds and leads both. The goal is unambiguous: build a world-class capability that drives accountability across product teams and lifts the stability of Cencora's IT and OT environments, so our customers experience best-in-class service. 

During the worst hours — a distribution center offline, a critical platform degraded — your commanders run the bridge, coordinate the responding teams, and own communication to executives, while engineers stay free to restore service. Your problem managers turn every major and every recurring incident into closed actions, published workarounds, and measurable recurrence reduction. You will define both practices from the ground up, staff them, and run them as a single learning loop: command the incident, learn comprehensively, chase the fix to closure, prevent the repeat. 

Responsibilities:

Major incident command 

• Build and lead the major incident command function: staff and train commanders, define the team structure and support model, and guarantee a commanded bridge for every declared major, around the clock. 

• Own the end-to-end major incident lifecycle: declaration against agreed criteria, bridge command and swarming coordination, executive and stakeholder communications, formal closure, hypercare and preliminary root cause announcement within first 12 hours and a complete handoff into problem management within 48 hours. 

• Keep command separate from troubleshooting: commanders drive decisions, timelines, and communications; technical teams restore service, supported by AI-assisted investigation and cross-product correlation on the bridge. 

• Maintain and drill the major incident procedure (severity matrix, escalation trees, communication templates) and run readiness exercises with the teams who restore service. 

Problem management 

• Build and lead the problem management practice covering both reactive problem work (from majors and recurring incidents) and proactive problem work (trend analysis, defect and vulnerability intake, prevention). 

• Chair problem reviews; drive prioritization of corrective actions into the owning teams' backlogs and chase them to verified closure, escalating chronic non-closure to the accountable leadership. 

• Own the known-error database and workaround lifecycle: validated, published workarounds that feed frontline operations and AI self-service. 

• Enforce the change-management linkage: permanent fixes route through change control with documented cost-benefit; explicit, communicated risk acceptance when a problem is deliberately not fixed. 

• Champion blameless, comprehensive post-incident reviews using structured techniques (5 whys, events & causal factor analysis, change analysis, barrier analysis) — examining triggers, impact amplifiers, and duration factors, not a single root cause. 

Leadership and improvement 

• Lead the transformation: own the roadmap that takes Cencora from today's practices to world-class major incident and problem management across IT and OT — with deliberate change management (communication, training, adoption measurement) that brings product teams, operations, and leadership through the change. 

• Hire, develop, and performance-manage both teams; build a bench where commanders carry incident context into the problem reviews they chair. 

• Report the function's scorecard to senior leadership: major incident MTTR, postmortem action completion, recurrence reduction, known-error coverage. 

• Partner with reliability engineering on automation and AI tooling that shortens bridges and deflects repeat work; partner with process governance on standards, audit findings, and continual improvement. 

Work Experience:

• 12+ years in IT operations / service management, including 5+ years in senior leadership of major incident and/or problem management functions — leading managers and distributed teams — in a global 24/7 enterprise environment. 

• Proven organizational transformation: has built or fundamentally rebuilt an enterprise operational capability — process, organization, tooling, and culture — and led teams through major operating-model change with measurable adoption. 

• Enterprise-scale accountability: experience establishing governance that drives action across dozens of product and engineering teams, with credible reporting and escalation at VP/SVP level. 

• Demonstrated incident command under pressure: running executive bridges for business-critical outages across distributed infrastructure (network, compute, storage, cloud). 

• Deep working knowledge of ITIL/ITSM practice design — incident, problem, change and their integrations — and experience operating against independently owned process standards. 

• A track record of driving cross-team accountability: corrective actions chased to closure across engineering teams, with recurrence measurably reduced. 

• Senior people leadership: hiring and developing managers and senior specialists, sustaining healthy 24/7 rotations, and owning function budgets and vendor / managed-service relationships. 

Skills and Knowledge:

• Experience in a product-based or SRE-influenced operating model, including exposure to “You Build It, You Run It,” DORA metrics, SLOs, error budgets, and blameless postmortem practices is preferred.

• Experience working across IT and OT environments, ideally including distribution center automation, warehouse, logistics, or similar operational systems, is preferred.

• Experience introducing AI and automation into incident response, such as AI-assisted investigation, chatbots, event correlation, and workload deflection, is preferred.

• ITIL 4 Managing Professional certification or equivalent, as well as formal incident command or major incident management training, is preferred.

• Experience in healthcare, pharmaceutical distribution, or another regulated or safety-critical industry is preferred.

Salary: 8605 - 12 293 EUR gross monthly

What Cencora offers

We offer a competitive annual bonus, life insurance from Day 1, a best-in-class health insurance package, and up to 6 fully paid benefit days a year. As a Cencora employee, you have the benefit of our referral bonus scheme, our boundless learning opportunities and our global Employee Assistance Program. We have a wonderful office location in Quadrum, equipped with everything you need for a small break at work and fresh snacks at all times. Become part of our purpose-driven, multicultural team now and help us create healthier futures

Full time

Affiliated Companies:

Affiliated Companies: World Courier (Lithuania) UAB