Staff Platform Resilience Event Manager

APEX Fintech Services • Austin, TX

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Platform Resilience Event Manager is responsible for the strategic planning, coordination, and/or execution of platform resilience events across our technology ecosystem. This includes game day events, disaster recovery testing, business continuity exercises, vendor disaster recovery coordination, and regulatory-driven resilience demonstrations. This role serves as the central orchestrator across the organization to ensure our resilience posture is continuously validated, documented, and improved. You will transform resilience testing into a strategic capability that demonstrates enterprise operational maturity. This is not a traditional event planning role—it requires deep understanding of distributed systems, financial services regulations, incident command structures, and cross-functional program management in a high-stakes environment.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field (or equivalent work experience) required
• 10+ years in technology operations, site reliability engineering (SRE), DevOps, or infrastructure roles
• 3+ years in financial services technology (preferably broker-dealer, clearing, custody, or payments)
• Hands-on experience with disaster recovery planning and execution in complex, distributed systems environments
• Experience supporting regulatory examinations and producing compliance documentation
• Financial Services & Regulatory Knowledge
• Working knowledge of FINRA, SEC, and financial services regulatory requirements for business continuity and disaster recovery
• Understanding of third-party risk management in regulated environments
• Technical Knowledge and Program & Project Management
• Understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP), database failover, load balancing, and multi-region architectures
• Familiarity with incident command systems, runbook automation, and monitoring/observability platforms
• Proven ability to manage complex, cross-functional programs with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities
• Experience leading high-stakes, time-sensitive events requiring real-time coordination and decision-making
• Strong project management skills: planning, scheduling, resource coordination, status reporting
• Comfort with ambiguity and ability to build new programs from the ground up
• Communication & Leadership
• Executive presence: able to brief C-suite and board on resilience posture and event outcomes
• Exceptional written communication: producing regulatory reports, audit evidence, executive summaries
• Incident command or crisis management experience preferred
• Ability to influence without authority across technical and non-technical teams

Nice To Haves

• Certifications: CBCP (Certified Business Continuity Professional), CISSP, GCP/AWS/Azure certifications, ITIL
• Chaos engineering experience (Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, etc.)
• Background in internal audit, GRC, or compliance roles
• Experience with tabletop exercises and red team/blue team scenarios

Responsibilities

• Resilience Event Strategy & Annual Planning
• Develop and maintain the annual Platform Resilience Event Calendar spanning all disaster recovery tests, business continuity exercises, game days, and vendor coordination events
• Align event schedule with regulatory examination cycles, customer audit requests, and internal risk assessment priorities
• Define success criteria and maturity progression for resilience events (e.g., tabletop → walkthrough → full failover → automated chaos)
• Maintain our risk register with updates based on resilience event findings
• Game Day & Chaos Engineering Program Leadership
• Design and facilitate "game day" exercises that inject controlled failures into production or staging environments to validate system resilience
• Partner with Engineering, SRE, Product and Ops teams to develop realistic failure scenarios (database outages, network partitions, dependency failures, traffic spikes)
• Build game day playbooks, observer guides, and scoring rubrics to measure system and team response effectiveness
• Evolve game day maturity from scheduled events to surprise/unannounced exercises (with appropriate stakeholder buy-in)
• Vendor Disaster Recovery Coordination
• Align and coordinate the Platform participation and preparation along with the Enterprise Risk team for DR/BC events
• In partnership with the Enterprise Risk Team, organize and coordinate vendor-led DR tests, ensuring Apex participation and validation of vendor recovery capabilities
• Ensure vendor DR documentation (runbooks, RTO/RPO commitments, contact lists) is current and accessible during incidents
• Ensure inventory of critical third-party vendors is maintained with contractual DR/BC obligations (cloud providers, tech vendors, service providers, SaaS/IaaS/PaaS services)
• Cross-Functional Stakeholder Alignment
• Serve as primary liaison between Platform and: Compliance, Legal, Enterprise Risk Management, Internal Audit
• Integrate Security incident response scenarios into resilience events (e.g., ransomware recovery, insider threat)
• Translate technical resilience outcomes into compliance artifacts, audit evidence, and regulatory examination responses
• Coordinate with Legal on customer contractual obligations for DR demonstrations and availability SLAs
• Regulatory, Audit and Client Contractual Readiness
• Maintain compliance with FINRA Rule 4370 (Business Continuity Plans), SEC regulations, and state-level financial services resilience requirements
• Produce request-ready documentation: GameDay Results and findings, Resilience metrics, improvement tracking
• Support regulatory examinations by providing examiner-requested evidence of resilience testing and improvement trends
• Track and report findings
• Metrics, Reporting & Continuous Improvement
• Define and track key resilience metrics: RTO/RPO actuals, DR test success rates, mean time to failover, game day findings, vendor DR SLA compliance
• Produce quarterly executive dashboards on resilience posture, event outcomes, and improvement initiatives
• Maintain centralized repository of runbooks, event after-action reports, and lessons learned
• Drive continuous improvement by converting event findings into actionable engineering backlogs and process improvements
• Benchmark Apex resilience maturity against industry standards (e.g., Gartner, NIST, financial services peers)
• Incident Response Integration
• Ensure resilience events validate and improve actual incident response capabilities (not just technical recovery)
• Integrate platform events with ITSM Incident Management training to build muscle memory for real outages
• Validate incident communication plans during events (customer notifications, executive escalations, status pages)
• Use real incidents as inputs for future game day scenarios ("let's replay last quarter's outage in a controlled environment")

Benefits

• healthcare benefits (medical, dental and vision, EAP)
• competitive PTO
• 401k match
• parental leave
• HSA contribution match
• paid subscription to the Calm app
• generous external learning and tuition reimbursement benefits
• hybrid work schedule for most roles that allows employees to have the flexibility of working from home and one of our primary offices

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees