Head of Operational Resilience

Viva.com; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Private health insurance

Career development

Job summary

Viva.com is seeking a seasoned leader to head our Incident Response function. You will own the DORA major ICT incident posture end-to-end, drive the IR programme across our European footprint, and be the operational voice when incidents occur.

This role requires hands-on technical depth with SIEM, cloud logs, and packet captures, combined with the ability to set strategy with executives and the board.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of total experience in security/IT operations.
• Proven track record leading incident response or SOC at executive scale.
• Hands-on with SIEMs, network captures, and cloud audit logs.
• Experience in banking, payments, fintech, or critical infrastructure is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead IR programme and DR posture across European footprint.
• Own major ICT incident classification and reporting, including authorities communications.
• Lead Site Reliability Engineering and ensure service reliability targets across stack.
• Oversee post-incident reviews to drive systemic improvements.
• Coordinate with Anti Financial Crime and Engineering teams in real time.

Skills

Incident response

SOC leadership

DORA/NIS2/PSD2 knowledge

SIEM/packet capture/cloud logs

Executive communication

Tools

SIEM

Job description

Viva.com, the 1st Tech Bank in Europe forBusinesses, revolutionises omnichannel payments acceptance, offers card issuing, loans anddeposit accounts.Viva.com is the first to pioneer and holds the top position in the Tap on Any Device technology, enabling payments acceptance on any device or even without a device.

Today Viva.com is leading the transition to All-in-One business solutions,powered by its full suite of financial services. To that end, reflecting itsholistic approach to business needs, Viva.com has built a dynamic ecosystem featuring over 450 tech partner-innovators in the software and hardware space. Connecting directly to all local payment schemes, alternative payment methods and payment systems across the continent, further strengthens Viva.com’s value proposition.

Viva.com envisions to provide businesses a value-driven platform to accelerate the adoption of the latest technology.

The Role

You will lead our Incident Response function. The team that detects, contains, eradicates, and learns from security and operational incidents across our banking, payments, and acquiring infrastructure. You will own our DORA major ICT incident posture end to end, run the IR programme across our European footprint, and be the operational voice in the room when something goes wrong.

This is not a paper role. You will be hands on enough to read a SIEM alert, technically deep enough to earn the trust of senior engineers, and senior enough to set strategy with the executive team and the board.

Key Responsibilities

• Run and continuously evolve our IR programme. Playbooks, escalation paths, on call rotations, retainer relationships with external DFIR partners, and a real tabletop cadence;
• Own DORA major ICT incident classification and reporting, including direct communication with competent authorities across our European footprint;
• Lead the Site Reliability Engineering function. Service reliability targets, error budgets, observability, and production health across our European stack;
• Own the bug management lifecycle across production. Triage, prioritization, accountability, and closure in lockstep with engineering;
• Run real time anti fraud alerts monitoring as a frontline operational capability, in close coordination with the Anti Financial Crime team;
• Integrate AI sensibly. Deploy agentic triage, evidence summarization, and detection engineering automation with clear human in the loop guardrails;
• Defend against AI era threats. Prompt injection, agentic and MCP tool abuse, model data leakage, deepfake driven social engineering against Customer Care, supply chain attacks on AI dependencies;
• Partner closely with Anti Financial Crime, Engineering and Customer Care. Act real time on containment and service availability;
• Run post mortems that actually change the system, not just the documentation.

At Viva.com, we believe in amplifying human potential through AI. When you join us, you’re stepping into a future-forward environment where technology empowers every role, driving smarter, more efficient.

Requirements

• At least 10 years of total experience, with at least 5 leading incident response or SOC functions;
• Demonstrated track record running real incidents end to end at executive scale. Ransomware, major data exposure, payment fraud campaign, or prolonged outage;
• Strong working knowledge of DORA, NIS2, PSD2, and EBA Guidelines on ICT and security risk management;
• Hands on technical depth. Can read a SIEM rule, a packet capture, and a cloud audit log without translation;
• Experience inside a bank, payments firm, fintech, or critical infrastructure operator;
• Practical understanding of AI as both threat surface and operational lever. Comfortable deploying AI in the SOC, equally comfortable saying no to it;
• Excellent communicator across audiences.

Nice to have

• GIAC certifications such as GCIH or GCFA. Or CISSP, CISM, OSCP.
• Background in offensive security, purple teaming, or detection engineering.
• Open source contributions to Sigma, YARA, Atomic Red Team, or similar.
• Published post mortems, conference talks, or written work that demonstrates clarity of thought under pressure.
• Multi country IR experience.

Benefits

Competitive compensation package;

Annual bonus based on your performance and targets’ achievement;

Private health insurance for you and your family;

Top of the Line tools and equipment;

Career development and regular feedback to develop your skills;

Employee Wellness Program like Daily group sessions led by professional coaches.