Principal Engineer - Major Incident Response & ITIL Platform

BJ's Wholesale Club•BJ's Club Support Center Marlborough, MA

13d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal Engineer, Major Incident Response & ITIL Platform Lead is a senior individual contributor and program leader who combines deep technical expertise with operational discipline. This role owns the design, configuration, and continuous evolution of the ITIL practice — including Major Incident Response (MIR), Post-Incident Review (PIR), and Problem Management — while serving as a hands-on engineer within ServiceNow and adjacent tooling platforms. Unlike a traditional SDM role, this position is explicitly technical: you will architect workflows, build automation, instrument observability, and drive platform maturity across stores, distribution centers, and digital environments. You will also lead a high-performing offshore team and act as the primary program authority during high-severity events — bridging the gap between engineering execution and executive communication.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience.
8+ years in IT Service Management with a strong technical bias — hands-on platform work, not just process governance.
5+ years of direct experience administering or engineering ServiceNow (workflow design, scripting, integrations, Performance Analytics).
Proven track record leading Major Incident Response in large-scale retail, e-commerce, or distributed digital environments.
Experience owning Problem Management and PIR programs with measurable outcomes (repeat incident reduction, MTTR improvement).
Demonstrated ability to manage and develop onshore/offshore teams in a follow-the-sun operations model.
Deep ServiceNow platform expertise understanding platform mechanics that drive configuration and administration.
Working knowledge of tools such as Dynatrace, Splunk, AlertOps/PagerDuty, or equivalent; ability to build event-to-incident automation bridges.
Observability & Monitoring: MS Teams, Jira — including integration design with ServiceNow.
Data & Reporting: Comfort with scripting (JavaScript, Python, or PowerShell) to accelerate toil elimination.
Able to command a major incident bridge — calm, decisive, technically credible under pressure.
Executive-level communication: concise, audience-aware, and trustworthy during crises.
Program management discipline: roadmaps, metrics, stakeholder alignment, and backlog ownership.
Growth mindset with a bias toward automation and measurable improvement.

Nice To Haves

ITIL 4 Strategic Leader or Managing Professional certification strongly preferred; ITIL Expert acceptable.
ServiceNow certifications (CSA, CIS-ITSM, or CIS-Event Management) highly desirable.
Collaboration & Comms: ServiceNow Performance Analytics, dashboard design, SLA/SLO instrumentation.

Responsibilities

Own and operate the MIR program end-to-end — from playbook authorship to real-time bridge command — for incidents impacting stores, DCs, POS, fuel, e-commerce, and membership systems.
Serve as Incident Commander during P1/P2 events, driving technical triage, stakeholder communication, and escalation decisions under pressure.
Design and maintain a universal MIR playbook with consistent execution standards 24x7, including on-call rotations for nights, weekends, and holidays.
Establish leadership notification templates, technical bridge protocols, and business-facing communication cadences during major incidents.
Instrument incident severity classification logic, auto-routing, and escalation thresholds directly within ServiceNow.
Own the end-to-end PIR lifecycle — blameless, data-driven reviews completed within SLA — and enforce action-item closure rigor.
Build and maintain an enterprise-wide RCA library, problem signatures, and trend intelligence within ServiceNow's CMDB and Problem Management modules.
Partner with SRE and Software Engineering to translate RCA findings into reliability-driven design improvements and automated runbooks.
Configure and manage PIR workflows, SLA timers, and notification rules natively in ServiceNow — no manual handoffs.
Act as a hands-on technical owner of ServiceNow ITSM modules: Incident, Problem, Change, and Event Management.
Design and build ServiceNow workflows, business rules, UI policies, Flow Designer automations, and integration spokes connecting monitoring platforms (Dynatrace, Splunk, PagerDuty/AlertOps, etc.).
Develop and maintain custom dashboards, real-time KPI reporting, and SLA/SLO tracking within ServiceNow Performance Analytics.
Own the Problem Management lifecycle: identification, logging, root cause investigation, routing, and verified resolution.
Surface recurring incident patterns from trend analysis and feed intelligence back into MIR and Service Excellence programs.
Ensure complete, accurate, and timely documentation of all Problems in ServiceNow with appropriate categorization and linkage to incidents and changes.
Lead and develop a high-performing offshore operations team, setting clear goals aligned to MIR and ITIL program objectives.
Drive a culture of automation-first thinking: identify manual toil and eliminate it through ServiceNow scripting, Flow Designer, and third-party integrations.
Conduct regular retrospectives, process audits, and tooling reviews; translate findings into prioritized improvement backlog items.
Present program health, metrics, and roadmap updates to senior IT and business leadership.