AVP - Infrastructure Resilience (Disaster Recovery & Operational Resilience)

About the role

The AVP - Infrastructure Resilience leads and strengthens the bank's technology resilience capabilities so that critical services can withstand, respond to and recover from disruptions. The role governs the Technology Resilience and Disaster Recovery programme, including strategy, policies, recovery planning, testing, regulatory compliance, risk management and continuous improvement. It works with technology teams, business stakeholders, risk and compliance functions and external partners.

Key responsibilities

• Develop, maintain and enhance enterprise disaster recovery policies, standards, procedures and frameworks, and govern DR readiness across applications and infrastructure
• Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, internal policies and audit recommendations, and manage DR risk assessments and remediation
• Plan and run disaster recovery drills and resilience exercises across regions and business units, lead DR testing for applications, infrastructure, databases and integrated systems, and track RTOs and RPOs
• Support operational resilience for critical services, review recovery strategies and collaborate with business continuity teams
• Lead DR automation and tooling integration, measure adoption and recovery performance, and support resilience innovation
• Manage audit engagements, coordinate responses to internal, external and regulatory findings, prepare audit evidence and track closure of audit observations
• Engage technology leadership, application, infrastructure, audit and security teams; run governance forums and steering committees; escalate critical issues and present resilience metrics to senior management
• Develop executive dashboards and KPI reporting, and prepare board-level, management and regulatory presentations
• Coordinate across UAE and other IBG locations and champion process improvement and automation

Required profile

• Extensive knowledge of disaster recovery, operational resilience, business continuity, IT risk management and regulatory compliance in a banking or highly regulated environment
• Proven experience leading enterprise recovery testing, resilience governance, audit remediation and resilience transformation
• Ability to work across medium to large, globally distributed and culturally diverse engineering and infrastructure teams
• Strong analytical, stakeholder management, governance and communication skills