Manager – Critical Situations

Job Description

The CriSit Manager owns the resolution of high-severity customer situations on Sapiens delivery engagements: major defects, stalled implementations, data issues, and at-risk programs where the customer relationship is under threat. They are the single point of accountability from the moment a CritSit is declared to the moment it is closed.

The role sits in Delivery success and has no direct reports. Results come through program management discipline, clear communication, and influence across Delivery, Engineering, Product, and Customer Success. It also calls for character as much as capability: customers and colleagues take their cue from how the Manager behaves under pressure.

Job Responsibilities

Critical Situation Ownership

• Own high-impact outages and severe escalations from first report to close-out, as the single point of accountability.
• Triage and validate escalations against the agreed severity and impact criteria.
• Stand up and run the war room, including bridge calls and a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, with the right stakeholders.
• Set priorities, owners, and action plans, and track them to completion.

Program and Delivery Recovery

• Agree a recovery plan within days of declaration, with clear milestones, dependencies, and exit criteria.
• Manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies, and re-baseline scope and timelines with the customer and Delivery leads where needed.
• Agree resourcing with Delivery leadership, and raise gaps early.
• Hold program governance, such as regular checkpoints and steering updates, until the customer is back on track.

Communication and Stakeholder Management

• Give customers, customer executives, and Delivery Success leadership clear, accurate, regular updates, and set expectations early.
• Translate technical detail into clear business impact and next steps, drawing on knowledge of insurance and financial-services core systems.
• Support senior customer conversations alongside Delivery leadership.
• Escalate to Business leadership when a decision on resourcing, remediation, or commitments is beyond agreed limits.

Cross-Functional Coordination

• Mobilize Engineering, CloudOps and DevOps, Support, and Product resources, and remove blockers.
• Keep Sales, Customer Success, and Account Management aligned on status and customer impact.
• Lead the cross-functional working team through influence, without formal line authority.

Root Cause and Continuous Improvement

• Drive root-cause analysis, write the customer-facing report, and complete the post-mortem.
• Ensure corrective and preventive actions are logged, owned, and delivered, and hand recurring failures to the owning group with playbook changes.
• Identify patterns across engagements, releases, and components, and share them with Delivery, Product, and Engineering.
• Report on CritSit metrics: time to engage, mitigate, and resolve; repeat incidents; open CritSit volume and ageing; and recovery plan milestone adherence.

Job Requirements

• Program management expertise, including recovering troubled programs through planning, risk and issue management, governance, and change control.
• Seven or more years in customer-facing technology, incident, or escalation roles, with first-hand experience as an Incident Commander or crisis lead.
• A track record of owning high-impact outages and severe escalations from first report to close-out, running the war room and mobilizing teams with no reporting line.
• Working knowledge of insurance or financial-services core systems, enough to judge business impact.
• Clear, accurate communication with customers and senior leaders at every level, with expectations set early.
• Practical experience using AI tools to improve incident management.
• Fluent English.
• Availability for the after-hours on-call rotation, and for travel to customer sites at short notice.
• A bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

The following are an advantage:

• Experience of the Insurance or financials platforms.
• ITIL major-incident practice.
• A further European language.
• PMP, PRINCE2, or similar certification.