Operational Resilience Americas Department

The Americas Operational Resilience Department enables the bank to effectively manage business threats and mitigate the risk of disruptions. The department ensures the readiness of each entity, as well as the ability to respond adequately to disruptive events, minimizing the impact on the delivery of services supporting the bank's critical operations.

The department addresses both Resilience Transformation and Resilience Operations. The transformation aspect encompasses resilience strategy, program execution, and the development of new capabilities across the organization. Meanwhile, resilience operations provide visibility and readiness in day-to-day activities, including new product launches, continuity testing, and event and crisis management.

The functions performed span the different lines of business and corporate functions across the Americas region to mitigate risks and disruptions through an efficient and sustainable framework, effectively reducing risk and enabling Mizuho to meet growing business expectations and regulatory requirements.

As part of Mizuho Americas' ongoing efforts to build a more resilient organization, we are creating a new role to establish, lead, and mature the Integrated Testing function within Operational Resilience. The Integrated Testing function operates as a testing-as-a-service capability, delivering end-to-end testing across the full spectrum of operational resilience requirements, including regulatory expectations, disaster recovery exercises such as loss of data centers, and a broad range of exercises performed at the asset, application, process, and entity levels.

The Head of Integrated Testing will design and execute a unified testing strategy that validates the firm's ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions to business operations. The mission is to validate that IT infrastructure, data, systems, and third-party services can be restored within the timeframes required by critical business processes and services, including in back-up environments and during extended outages such as cyber events.

This role enables the Operational Resilience reporting on real capabilities and will partnering with all the Operational Resilience pillars such as Business Continuity Management (BCM), Disaster Recovery (DR), Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM), Cyber resilience, IT continuity, and the lines of business, with regular engagement with internal audit.

Key Responsibilities

Integrated Testing Leadership
• Define and lead the Integrated Testing strategy within the Operational Resilience program, covering capability, DR, third-party, data, and scenario-based exercises at the asset, application, and process levels.
• Design and operate a testing-as-a-service delivery model with clearly defined service level agreements, intake procedures, and engagement standards for stakeholders across the three lines of defense.
• Establish a multi-year testing roadmap aligned to the firm's critical operations, impact tolerances, and regulatory commitments, including extension of the DR test window over multiple consecutive days to demonstrate the firm's ability to withstand severe business disruptions and operate during extended outages such as cyber events.
• Provide testing services of the Operational Resilience functions to ensure data quality and controls effectiveness

Disaster Recovery and Scenario Testing
• Lead the DR Testing Program, including test strategy designed to address the threat landscape and critical third parties, stakeholder engagement, test planning (scope, objectives, success criteria, assumptions), test scripts (operational steps, expected and actual results), test day execution and coordination, and post-test reporting.
• Oversee data center loss exercises, failover and failback validation, cyber recovery exercises, and integrated cross-entity scenarios spanning Americas operations and relevant global affiliates.
• Drive issue management arising from testing, including prioritization, action plans, ownership, and target dates, with escalation paths to senior management.

Integrated Exercises at Asset and Process Levels
• Coordinate asset-level (application, infrastructure, facility) and process-level (business service, critical operation) exercises, ensuring alignment with RTO, RPO, MTD and impact tolerance objectives.
• Integrate third-party testing, including ascertaining contractual testing requirements of third parties supporting critical operations and facilitating joint testing with BCM, DR, and TPRM teams.
• Coordinate tabletop exercises, crisis simulations, and severe but plausible scenario testing that span business, technology, vendor, and crisis management dimensions.

Governance, Reporting, and Regulatory Engagement
• Maintain DR and testing policies, standards, and procedures, ensuring alignment with senior leadership expectations, regulatory oversight and reporting requirements, and audit reviews and continuous monitoring.
• Define and report Key Risk Indicators, Key Performance Indicators, and compliance metrics to provide insights for decision making by the Operational Resilience leadership team and senior management.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for regulators, internal audit, and independent assessments on testing matters, ensuring audit-defensible documentation and remediation of findings.
• Ensure alignment with applicable regulatory frameworks, including FFIEC IT Handbook (Business Continuity Management), Federal Reserve SR 20-24, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) Principles for Operational Resilience, OCC and FDIC guidance, CFTC 23.603, PRA and FCA expectations, and the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) where relevant to affiliated entities.

Operating Model, Talent, and Tools
• Build and lead the Integrated Testing team, defining roles, responsibilities, and career paths; recruit, develop, and retain talent with the required technical and business expertise.
• Define the operating model and RACI with key stakeholders across IT, TPRM, BRM, BCM, Cyber, and the lines of business.
• Deploy and optimize tools to enable planning, execution, issue management, and reporting, leveraging market solutions such as Fusion Risk Management or ServiceNow, Power BI, SharePoint, Copilot, and AI-enabled analytics.
• Drive the Operational Resilience Data Quality and Controls function to ensure data integrity and accuracy of testing information and metrics.

Sustainability and Continuous Improvement
• Ensure adequate resources, training, and awareness to support the ongoing program, capturing lessons learned and embedding them into subsequent test cycles.
• Drive maturity of the testing function through benchmarking, automation, and adoption of leading practices across the industry.

Qualifications

Education and Experience
• Master degree in Business, Engineering, Information Systems, Finance, Risk Management, or a related field; advanced degree or relevant professional certifications (CBCP, MBCP, CISA, CISSP, CRISC) preferred.
• Minimum of 12 to 15 years of progressive experience in disaster recovery, operational resilience, business continuity or integrated testing within the financial services, insurance, or investment management sectors, with a strong understanding of Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) operations.
• Demonstrated experience building and leading a testing function at scale, including DR exercises involving loss of data centers, cyber recovery, and multi-day extended outage scenarios.

Technical and Functional Expertise
• Deep familiarity with key components of operational resilience programs, including governance, scenario development and testing, crisis response, and education and awareness initiatives.
• Strong understanding of regulatory requirements and supervisory expectations related to operational resilience, including:
• Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) Principles for Operational Resilience
• U.S. Federal Reserve, OCC, and FDIC guidance
• FFIEC IT Handbook and SR 20-24
• UK Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) requirements
• EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA)
• Experience with tools such as Fusion Risk Management or ServiceNow, as well as Power BI and SharePoint.

Leadership and Soft Skills
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence senior stakeholders across the three lines of defense.
• Strong analytical, reporting, and stakeholder engagement capabilities.
• Ability to perform effectively under pressure, manage crises and operational disruptions with a structured, strategic, and composed approach.
• Executive presence, with the ability to communicate complex technical and risk concepts to non-technical audiences, including the Board

The expected base salary ranges from $175,000.00. - $200,000.00. Salary offers are based on a wide range of factors including relevant skills, training, experience, education, and, where applicable, certifications and licenses obtained. Market and organizational factors are also considered. In addition to salary and a generous employee benefits package, including but not limited to Medical, Dental and 401k that begin on day one of employment, successful candidates are also eligible to receive a discretionary bonus.

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Other requirements

Mizuho has in place a hybrid working program, with varying opportunities for remote work depending on the nature of the role, needs of your department, as well as local laws and regulatory obligations. Roles in some of our departments have greater in-office requirements that will be communicated to you as part of the recruitment process