Manager, Critical Situations

Sapiens•,

About The Position

The CriSit Manager owns the resolution of high-severity customer situations on Sapiens delivery engagements, including major defects, stalled implementations, data issues, and at-risk programs where the customer relationship is under threat. The role is the single point of accountability from the time a Critical Situation is declared until it is closed. The position sits in Delivery Success and has no direct reports. It achieves results through program-management discipline, clear communication, and influence across Delivery, Engineering, Product, and Customer Success. The role requires steady conduct under pressure, as customers and colleagues take their cue from the Manager's behavior. The Manager leads incident response and program recovery, communicates with customers and senior leaders, coordinates cross-functional teams, drives root-cause analysis and corrective actions, and reports on Critical Situation metrics. The role includes availability for an after-hours on-call rotation and travel to customer sites at short notice.

Requirements

Seven or more years in customer-facing technology, incident, or escalation roles.
First-hand experience as an Incident Commander or crisis lead.
A track record of owning high-impact outages and severe escalations from first report to close-out, running the war room and mobilizing teams without a reporting line.
Program-management expertise, including recovering troubled programs through planning, risk and issue management, governance, and change control.
Working knowledge of insurance or financial-services core systems sufficient to judge business impact.
Clear, accurate communication with customers and senior leaders at every level, with expectations set early.
Practical experience using AI tools to improve incident management.
Fluent English.
Availability for the after-hours on-call rotation and travel to customer sites at short notice.
A bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with insurance or financial-services platforms.
ITIL major-incident practice.
A further European language.
PMP, PRINCE2, or similar certification.

Responsibilities

Own high-impact outages and severe escalations from first report through close-out as the single point of accountability.
Triage and validate escalations against agreed severity and impact criteria.
Establish and run war rooms, including bridge calls and a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, with appropriate stakeholders.
Set priorities, owners, and action plans, and track actions through completion.
Agree on a recovery plan within days of declaration, with clear milestones, dependencies, and exit criteria.
Manage risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies; re-baseline scope and timelines with the customer and Delivery leads when needed.
Agree on resourcing with Delivery leadership and raise resourcing gaps early.
Maintain program governance, including regular checkpoints and steering updates, until the customer is back on track.
Provide customers, customer executives, and Delivery Success leadership with clear, accurate, regular updates and set expectations early.
Translate technical details into business impact and next steps, drawing on knowledge of insurance and financial-services core systems.
Support senior customer conversations alongside Delivery leadership.
Escalate to Business leadership when decisions about resourcing, remediation, or commitments exceed agreed limits.
Mobilize Engineering, CloudOps and DevOps, Support, and Product resources, and remove blockers.
Keep Sales, Customer Success, and Account Management aligned on status and customer impact.
Lead the cross-functional working team through influence without formal line authority.
Drive root-cause analysis, write customer-facing reports, and complete post-mortems.
Ensure corrective and preventive actions are logged, assigned, and delivered; hand recurring failures to the owning group with playbook changes.
Identify patterns across engagements, releases, and components, and share them with Delivery, Product, and Engineering.
Report Critical Situation metrics, including time to engage, mitigate, and resolve; repeat incidents; open Critical Situation volume and ageing; and recovery-plan milestone adherence.