The AVP – Infrastructure Resilience is responsible for leading and strengthening Mashreq Bank’s technology resilience capabilities to ensure critical technology services can withstand, respond to, and recover from disruptions. The role provides governance and oversight of the Technology Resilience and Disaster Recovery program, including resilience strategy, policies, recovery planning, testing, regulatory compliance, risk management, and continuous improvement initiatives.

The position leads the planning, coordination, and execution of disaster recovery and resilience activities across applications, infrastructure, and technology services, ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements and industry best practices. Working closely with technology teams, business stakeholders, risk and compliance functions, and external partners, the role drives resilience readiness, enhances recovery capabilities, promotes resilience automation, and supports the Bank’s operational resilience objectives.

Key Result Areas:

Disaster Recovery Governance

• Develop, maintain, and enhance enterprise Disaster Recovery policies, standards, procedures, and frameworks.
• Govern DR readiness across all the applications and infrastructure platforms.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, internal policies, and audit recommendations.
• Manage DR risk assessments and track remediation of identified resilience gaps.
• Drive recovery capability maturity across all technology domains.

DR Planning & Testing

• Plan, coordinate, and facilitate disaster recovery drills and resilience exercises across multiple regions and business units.
• Lead applications, infrastructure, database, and integrated DR testing activities.
• Track Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
• Validate recovery procedures and ensure lessons learned are incorporated into future plans.

Operational Resilience

• Support operational resilience initiatives for critical business services.
• Review recovery strategies and service restoration priorities.
• Collaborate with business continuity teams to improve end-to-end resilience capabilities.
• Develop resilience metrics, KPIs, and reporting dashboards.

DR Automation & Continuous Improvement

• Lead Disaster Recovery automation initiatives and tooling integration.
• Identify opportunities to reduce manual recovery activities.
• Measure automation adoption and recovery performance improvements.
• Support innovation initiatives related to resilience and recoverability.

Audit, Risk & Regulatory Compliance

• Manage technology resilience audit engagements and remediation activities.
• Coordinate responses to internal audit, external audit, and regulatory findings.
• Prepare evidence and documentation for audits and regulatory examinations.
• Support regulatory submissions related to DR and operational resilience.
• Track closure of audit observations and risk acceptance requests.

Stakeholder Management

• Engage with Technology Leadership, Application Owners, Infrastructure Teams, Audit Teams, and Security Teams
• Facilitate governance forums, steering committees, and resilience reviews.
• Escalate critical issues impacting resilience readiness.
• Present resilience metrics and executive updates to senior management.
• Drive accountability for recovery preparedness across technology teams.

Reporting & Management Communications

• Develop executive dashboards and resilience KPI reporting.
• Prepare board-level, management, and regulatory presentations.
• Monitor trends and provide recommendations for resilience improvements.

Cross-Country Coordination: Foster collaboration among teams located in UAE and all IBG locations, ensuring alignment of operational standards, best practices, and business objectives.

Operational Excellence: Champion process improvement, automation, and best practices to drive efficiency, reliability, and agility.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Extensive knowledge of Disaster Recovery, Operational Resilience, Business Continuity, IT Risk Management, and Regulatory Compliance within a banking or highly regulated environment. 

• Proven experience in leading enterprise recovery testing, resilience governance, audit remediation, and resilience transformation initiatives. 

• Strong analytical, stakeholder management, governance, and communication skills, with the ability to drive cross-functional programs and influence senior stakeholders to achieve resilience and recovery objectives. 

• Proven capability in working across medium to large, globally distributed and culturally diverse engineering and infrastructure operations teams, with a strong focus on resilience governance and risk management, is essential.