Operational Resilience Manager

Standard Life plc; Telford; Hybrid; GBP 59,000 - 72,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private medical cover

38 days annual leave

Excellent pension

12x salary life assurance

Career breaks

Income protection

3x volunteering days

Job summary

Standard Life plc is seeking an Operational Resilience Manager for the Crisis & Response team. The role focuses on strengthening resilience across essential services by mapping dependencies, planning contingencies and designing rigorous stress tests and simulations.

You will work across business, technology and third parties to identify vulnerabilities, challenge assumptions and drive improvements in service resilience. Hybrid working with multiple UK locations is offered.

Qualifications

• Operational Resilience experience with understanding of Important and Critical Business Services, impact tolerances, mapping, planning and testing in resilience.
• Experience designing, executing and assessing complex scenarios, stress tests, simulations or exercises.
• Strong analytical abilities to interpret evidence and identify vulnerabilities.
• Experience of service and dependency testing across technology and third parties.
• Ability to challenge SMEs and manage testing from design through to reporting.

Responsibilities

• Map Important and Critical Business Services end to end and identify vulnerabilities, concentrations or failure points.
• Translate mapping into practical resilience plans with recovery strategies and contingencies.
• Design and deliver deep resilience testing using challenging scenarios, stress tests, exercises and simulations.
• Test failures in combinations to reveal vulnerabilities before disruptions.
• Turn testing insights into actions to drive improvements and stronger future mapping, planning and testing.

Skills

Operational resilience

Testing design

Stress testing

Analytical skills

Stakeholder management

Problem solving

Job description

If you’re someone who enjoys solving complex problems and cares about building things that last, Standard Life could be the place for you. We’re looking for an Operational Resilience Manager – Map, Plan & Test to join our Operational Resilience Crisis & Response team.

Job Type: Fixed Term Contract 12 months

Location: Edinburgh, Birmingham, and London. Hybrid working

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 10/11/26

Salary and benefits: Up to £65,000 (dependant upon skills/experience) plus an indicative bonus range of indicative bonus range of 16-32%private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

The role

This is a hands-on opportunity to strengthen the resilience of Standard Life’s Important and Critical Business Services. You’ll build a deep understanding of how our services and their dependencies work, help shape how we prepare for disruption, and design challenging scenarios, stress tests and simulations that put their resilience to the test.

You’ll get a unique view across the organisation, working across business, technology and third parties to understand complex services, identify vulnerabilities, challenge assumptions and drive improvements in service resilience.

You’ll get underneath our services and their dependencies, translate mapping into practical resilience plans, and design testing that explores vulnerabilities and provides evidence of how services perform under disruption.

This isn’t about testing to get a pass. You’ll design testing that challenges assumptions, explores breaking points and uncovers vulnerabilities before a real disruption does.

• Map our Important and Critical Business Services end to end, understanding how they operate, what they depend on and where vulnerabilities, concentrations or potential points of failure exist.
• Translate mapping into practical resilience plans, working with service owners to strengthen recovery strategies, contingencies and workarounds.
• Design and deliver deep resilience testing, using challenging scenarios, stress testing, exercises and simulations to explore how services and their dependencies perform under disruption.
• Push beyond the obvious, testing individual and combined dependency failures, challenging assumptions and assessing outcomes against impact tolerances and recovery objectives.
• Turn insight into action, using evidence from testing to identify vulnerabilities, drive improvements and strengthen future mapping, planning and testing.

What are we looking for?

We’re looking for a tester and problem-solver: someone who is curious about how things work and how they fail, enjoys challenging assumptions and can design testing that explores vulnerabilities and provides real insight into service resilience.

• Operational Resilience experience, with a strong understanding of Important and Critical Business Services, impact tolerances and the role of mapping, planning and testing in building service resilience.
• Strong testing capability, with experience designing, executing and assessing complex scenarios, stress tests, simulations or exercises, including severe but plausible scenarios.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to understand complex end-to-end services, dependencies and failure modes, interpret evidence and identify vulnerabilities or weaknesses.
• Experience of service and dependency testing, ideally spanning technology, third parties and other critical dependencies, and the ability to turn findings into clear remediation and resilience improvements.
• Strong stakeholder, facilitation and delivery skills, with the confidence to challenge business and technical SMEs and manage testing from design through to assessment and reporting.

We Want To Hire The Whole Version Of You.

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.