OverviewDecisionPoint seeks a Senior IT Operations & Incident Response Manager to coordinate daily operational monitoring, incident triage, outage recovery, and service-restoration activities for the USMEPCOM ENLIST program.
Working under the Systems / Network Administrator Lead / ORT Lead, this position will mobilize technical teams, coordinate approved recovery procedures, maintain detailed incident timelines, and ensure accurate status communications throughout active outages. The IT Operations & Incident Response Manager will integrate response activities with the Service Desk and applicable ITSM processes while supporting incident reporting, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking.
The successful candidate will bring strong operational judgment, incident-coordination experience, and the ability to organize multiple technical teams during time-sensitive service disruptions.
This position is located in N. Chicago, Illinois, and requires on-site work five days per week. The role supports a 24/7/365 outage-response capability and may require availability outside normal business hours.
Note: By applying to this position, you acknowledge and consent to having your resume included in an active competitive government contract bid.
Duties & Responsibilities
The IT Operations & Incident Response Manager will:
- Coordinate daily monitoring of USMEPCOM networks, applications, systems, cloud services, and supporting infrastructure.
- Review operational alerts, outage notifications, service degradation reports, and end-user incident reports.
- Receive, log, validate, classify, prioritize, and triage outage notifications from monitoring tools, Service Desk personnel, technical teams, and end users.
- Work under the direction of the Systems / Network Administrator Lead / ORT Lead during outage-response and recovery activities.
- Mobilize the appropriate infrastructure, network, systems, application, database, cloud, storage, vendor, and Government support teams.
- Establish and maintain incident bridges, communications channels, ticket records, action trackers, and restoration timelines.
- Coordinate execution of approved diagnostic, mitigation, workaround, recovery, and service-restoration procedures.
- Track technical assignments, responsible teams, dependencies, actions, decisions, target times, and current restoration status.
- Maintain a complete incident timeline covering detection, notification, triage, escalation, diagnosis, mitigation, recovery, validation, and closure.
- Provide accurate status updates at intervals not exceeding one hour during active SEV 1 and SEV 2 outages.
- Prepare clear operational updates for the ORT Lead, Service Desk Branch Chief, Government stakeholders, and program leadership.
- Coordinate Service Desk messaging and ensure internal stakeholders receive consistent and approved outage communications.
- Respond promptly to Government requests for incident status, technical findings, recovery estimates, and supporting information.
- Escalate unresolved issues, resource constraints, vendor delays, technical dependencies, and restoration risks to the ORT Lead.
- Coordinate vendor, carrier, utility, cloud-provider, subcontractor, and third-party support engagement as directed.
- Track temporary workarounds and contingency measures used when full restoration is not immediately possible.
- Confirm that recovery actions are appropriately approved and executed by authorized technical personnel.
- Coordinate service-validation activities to confirm that affected systems and functionality have been restored.
- Support development of written incident reports following service restoration.
- Collect incident details, technical findings, logs, ticket records, communications, timelines, actions, and supporting evidence for post-incident reporting.
- Support root-cause analysis sessions and document contributing factors, technical causes, process gaps, corrective actions, and preventive recommendations.
- Track post-incident corrective and preventive actions through completion.
- Integrate outage-response activities with incident, problem, change, configuration, availability, continuity, and knowledge-management processes.
- Ensure incident records are complete, accurate, consistent, and suitable for operational metrics, audits, and Government review.
- Support quarterly reviews and updates of the operational Incident Response Plan.
- Participate in outage-response exercises, tabletop reviews, call-tree validations, readiness assessments, and escalation tests.
- Maintain incident-response procedures, contact lists, escalation paths, checklists, communications templates, and knowledge articles.
- Develop incident-volume, response-time, restoration-time, severity, trend, and recurring-cause reports.
- Identify opportunities to improve monitoring, triage, escalation, communications, documentation, and restoration workflows.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Active Secret clearance or higher.
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
- Minimum of 7 years of relevant IT operations, computer operations, incident management, infrastructure support, systems administration, or network operations experience.
- Current ITIL Foundation certification.
- Ability to work on-site in N. Chicago, Illinois, five days per week.
- Ability to support outage-response activities outside normal business hours when required.
Preferred Qualifications
- Current Cisco Certified Network Associate, CompTIA Network+, or another relevant systems, networking, infrastructure, or IT operations certification.
- Experience coordinating major-incident or outage-response activities in a federal or DoD environment.
- Experience supporting a 24/7/365 network operations center, service operations center, command center, or Outage Response Team.
- Experience managing SEV 1, SEV 2, and SEV 3 incidents using defined escalation and communications procedures.
- Experience coordinating infrastructure, network, systems, application, database, cloud, storage, and vendor teams during service disruptions.
- Experience maintaining incident timelines, action trackers, communications records, and recovery documentation.
- Experience providing recurring incident-status updates to Government, technical, and executive stakeholders.
- Experience supporting root-cause analysis and tracking corrective and preventive actions.
- Knowledge of ITIL incident, major-incident, problem, change, configuration, availability, service continuity, and knowledge-management practices.
- Experience using ServiceNow or a comparable ITSM platform for incident, problem, change, configuration, and knowledge management.
- Familiarity with enterprise monitoring, event-management, alerting, network-performance, and observability tools.
- General knowledge of network, server, application, cloud, database, storage, LAN, WAN, and SAN operations.
- Experience developing incident metrics, operational reports, outage analyses, dashboards, and leadership briefings.
- Strong crisis coordination, organization, communication, documentation, decision-making, and follow-through skills.
- Ability to manage multiple technical teams, assignments, dependencies, and deadlines during high-impact incidents.
