About Us:
Planet is a leading technology company transforming payments by putting customer experience first. We offer integrated solutions that include payment processing, VAT refunds, dynamic currency conversion, and management services for merchants in the Retail and Hospitality sectors worldwide.
In recent years, we have experienced significant growth, expanding our services and global presence.
With strong private equity investors, Advent International and Eurazeo, we have the financial capital and expertise to grow our capabilities and reach through acquisitions.
Our mission is to create a world of connected commerce where payments are simple, secure, and seamless, enabling our partners to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.
Role Overview:
We are seeking an experienced Major Incident Management Lead SDM with deep ITIL expertise and a proven track record in managing critical incidents in financial services environments. This role is responsible for leading our ITSM Major Incident function consisting of internal and external teams.
The successful candidate will be responsible for leading / shaping our 24/7 Major Incident function, maintaining service continuity, minimising business disruption, and ensuring high availability of key systems in our 24/7 online regulated payment environment. You will act as the bridge between technical teams, executive stakeholders, and service management functions during high-pressure events, driving service recovery and ensuring accurate timely business impact assessment are provided.
What you will do:
Major Incident Management (ITSM):
Act as the single point of accountability for all major incidents affecting business-critical services.
Serve as the Incident Commander for all Priority 1 (P1) and high-severity (P2) incidents affecting critical systems, ensuring timely triage, escalation, resolution, and stakeholder communication (working with the ITSM communication team).
Lead the Major Incident lifecycle: identification, impact assessment, coordination of response teams, root cause capture, and incident closure.
Lead real-time war rooms, driving cross-functional teams to resolve incidents quickly and effectively.
Deliver structured, risk-aware communications to executive stakeholders, including business leadership, compliance, and client-facing teams.
Ensure accurate and timely documentation of incidents in ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow), and facilitate Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) to drive remediation and service improvement.
Provide coaching and mentoring to incident managers and support teams to raise operational excellence.
Ensure adherence to ITIL best practices for Incident, Problem, and Change Management.
Monitor and report on incident KPIs, including MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve), SLA compliance, and service availability.
Maintain readiness for regulatory audits, including compliance with PCI-DSS, DORA, GDPR, ACPR or ISO 27001 where applicable.
Governance & Continuous Improvement:
Maintain a structured MIM framework aligned to ITIL v4 and operational resilience principles.
Partner with Problem Management, Change Management, and Risk & Compliance to identify systemic issues and ensure closed-loop resolution.
Continuously improve the major incident management process, leveraging ITIL CSI (Continual Service Improvement).
Report on MIM performance, trends, and risks to senior IT and business leadership.
Participate in business continuity, disaster recovery (DR), and resiliency planning and testing.
Who you are:
Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Business, or related field.
12–15 years of experience in IT operations, service management, incident response, with at least 5+ years in a leadership or command role.
Proven track record in Major Incident Management, preferably in a 24/7 regulated environment such as financial services.
Deep understanding of ITIL v3/v4; ITIL Foundation required, Intermediate/Managing Professional preferred.
Experience working with monitoring and ITSM tools such as Coralogix ServiceNow, Splunk, AppDynamics, PagerDuty, or BMC Remedy.
Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with experience briefing senior leadership during live incidents.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience managing a 24/7 Major Incident Management function
Familiarity with cloud operations (AWS, Azure), hybrid environments, or DevOps support models.
Background in cybersecurity incident handling is a plus.
Knowledge of compliance frameworks (e.g., PCI-DSS, DORA, GDPR, ACPR) relevant to incident governance and business continuity.
Key Competencies:
Calm, authoritative decision-making under pressure
Real-time coordination and communication
Incident command and stakeholder engagement
Operational leadership and team oversight
Risk and impact awareness in regulated environments
Process orientation with continuous improvement mindset
Why Planet:
Planet is an equal opportunity employer where diversity is valued, and all employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.
Come and grow your career in the most exciting, fast paced technology market, with a business that delivers feel-good connected commerce. We would love to hear from you – Apply now.
At Planet, we embrace a hybrid work model, with three days a week in the office.
Reasonable accommodations may be made in order to allow for an individual to perform the essential functions of this role successfully.
Top Skills
What We Do
Planet is a leading global provider of integrated technology and payments solutions for retail and hospitality customers.
We create great experiences for the millions of people who use our Payments, Software, and Tax Free solutions every minute of every day.
Planet empowers its customers to deliver amazing customer experiences by combining payments and technology in ways that drive greater loyalty, increase revenue and save time.
Founded over 35 years ago and with our headquarters in London, today we have more than 2,500 employees located across six continents serving our customers in over 120 markets
