A major Belgian bank's IT Service Availability and Resilience department coordinates continuity measures for critical applications and data-centre services. As an IT Continuity Exercise Coordinator, you will organise end-to-end disaster recovery exercises, work with infrastructure and application teams, and use MS Office and ServiceNow to track readiness, actions, and outcomes. The six-person team is based in Brussels and operates within a 25-person resilience department.
The mission
The team ensures that the bank can react and recover when a critical application or data centre becomes unavailable. Its work covers two data centres, multiple application and infrastructure components, and continuity requirements shaped by European and Belgian financial regulators as well as group policies. Exercises take place at local and group level and are designed to validate recovery procedures before they are needed in production.
You will coordinate the full lifecycle of end-to-end IT continuity exercises for several tribes. Your scope includes confirming the readiness of critical recovery blocks, identifying technical and functional validators, studying infrastructure capacity, preparing risk mitigation plans, and consolidating recovery actions into a Master Run Book. You will facilitate the execution of approximately three exercises per year, including occasional night or weekend sessions, then produce the exercise report and follow up on remaining actions.
Your responsibilities
- Coordinate IT continuity exercises and Disaster Recovery Plans from initial scope definition through final action follow-up.
- Validate the readiness of recovery components, application contacts, technical validators, and functional stakeholders before each exercise.
- Assess the capacity and dependencies of infrastructure components across the bank's two data centres.
- Prepare exercise schedules, risk registers, mitigation plans, and the information required by local and group stakeholders.
- Build the Master Run Book by collecting and structuring recovery actions from all participating teams.
- Facilitate exercise execution and report results, findings, and corrective actions to the relevant tribes and resilience contacts.
Your profile
Essential skills
- 3 to 5 years of professional IT experience, with the ability to coordinate technical work across application and infrastructure teams.
- Experience working in at least one technical domain such as Windows, Linux, mainframe, cloud, application development, databases, or middleware.
- Capability to understand technical dependencies and translate them into practical recovery steps and exercise documentation.
- Hands-on proficiency with MS Office and ServiceNow for planning, tracking, reporting, and stakeholder follow-up.
- Clear communication, structured coordination, sound decision-making, and the ability to remain effective during high-pressure exercise execution.
- A curious and collaborative approach, with the confidence to ask questions, share knowledge, and work with stakeholders from different teams.
Preferred skills
- Experience with IT continuity, disaster recovery, operational resilience, or end-to-end testing.
- Exposure to financial-sector regulations, data-centre operations, or recovery planning across multiple technology domains.
- Knowledge of Dutch or French.
Languages
- English: high proficiency, equivalent to approximately CEFR C1.
- Dutch or French: a plus, with no minimum CEFR level specified.
Education
- Relevant IT education or equivalent professional experience.