Delivery Critical Situations Manager

The Manager, Critical Situations owns the resolution of high-severity customer situations (CritSits) on Sapiens delivery engagements: major defects, stalled implementations, data issues and at-risk programmes. You are the single point of accountability from the moment a CritSit is declared to the moment it is closed, leading a cross-functional team without formal line authority.

You are the calmest voice in a tense room: accountable, candid, empathetic, decisive and organised.
This is an individual contributor role in Delivery Success, reporting to the Delivery Success CritSit Regional Leader. Based at a regional hub, hybrid, with on-site visits at short notice and an after-hours on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

• Own high-impact outages and severe escalations from first report to close-out, triaging against agreed severity criteria.
• Run the war room, including bridge calls and a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, setting priorities, owners and action plans.
• Agree a recovery plan within days of declaration, with milestones, dependencies and exit criteria, and manage risks, issues and re-baselined timelines.
• Agree resourcing with Delivery leadership and hold programme governance until the customer is back on track.
• Give customers and leadership clear, regular updates, translating technical detail into business impact and next steps.
• Escalate to business leadership when decisions exceed agreed limits.
• Mobilise Engineering, CloudOps and DevOps, Support and Product, and keep Sales, Customer Success and Account Management aligned.
• Drive root-cause analysis, the customer-facing report and the post-mortem, and make sure corrective and preventive actions are delivered.
• Spot patterns across engagements and releases, and report CritSit metrics: time to engage, mitigate and resolve, repeat incidents, ageing, and milestone adherence.

Requirements

• 7+ years in customer-facing technology, incident or escalation roles, including first-hand experience as an Incident Commander or crisis lead.
• Programme management expertise, including recovering troubled programmes through planning, risk management, governance and change control.
• Track record of owning high-impact outages and severe escalations end to end, running the war room and mobilising 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, setting expectations early.
• Practical experience using AI tools to improve incident management.
• Fluent English, availability for after-hours on-call, and willingness to travel to customer sites at short notice.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

An advantage: ITIL major-incident practice, a further European language, and PMP, PRINCE2 or similar certification.