IT Operations & Incident Response Manager (Senior)

About the role

Computer World Services, Corp. (CWS) 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 / Outage Response Team (ORT) Lead, this position mobilizes technical teams, coordinates approved recovery procedures, maintains detailed incident timelines, and ensures accurate status communications throughout active outages.

The IT Operations & Incident Response Manager integrates response activities with the Service Desk and applicable ITSM processes and supports incident reporting, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking. The successful candidate brings strong operational judgment and the ability to organize multiple technical teams during time-sensitive service disruptions.

Key Tasks & Responsibilities

• Coordinate daily monitoring of USMEPCOM networks, applications, systems, cloud services, and supporting infrastructure.
• Receive, log, validate, classify, prioritize, and triage outage notifications and alerts from monitoring tools, the Service Desk, technical teams, and end users.
• Under the direction of the ORT Lead, mobilize 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; track assignments, dependencies, decisions, and target times.
• Maintain a complete incident timeline from detection and notification through escalation, diagnosis, mitigation, recovery, validation, and closure.
• Provide status updates at intervals not exceeding one hour during active Severity (SEV) 1 and SEV 2 outages; coordinate consistent Service Desk messaging and respond promptly to Government requests for status and recovery estimates.
• Coordinate execution of approved diagnostic, mitigation, workaround, and recovery procedures by authorized personnel, and coordinate service validation to confirm restoration.
• Escalate unresolved issues, resource constraints, vendor delays, and restoration risks to the ORT Lead; coordinate vendor, carrier, utility, cloud-provider, and third-party engagement as directed.
• Collect incident evidence, support written incident reports and root-cause analysis sessions, and track corrective and preventive actions through completion.
• Integrate outage response with incident, problem, change, configuration, availability, continuity, and knowledge-management processes, and ensure incident records are suitable for metrics, audits, and Government review.
• Support quarterly Incident Response Plan reviews, outage-response exercises, tabletop reviews, and call-tree validations; maintain procedures, contact lists, escalation paths, and templates.
• Develop incident-volume, response-time, restoration-time, severity, and trend reports, and recommend improvements to monitoring, triage, escalation, and restoration workflows.

Education & Experience

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• Minimum of seven (7) years of relevant IT operations, computer operations, incident management, infrastructure support, systems administration, or network operations experience.
• Ability to work on-site in N. Chicago, IL, five days per week, and to support outage response outside normal business hours when required.

Preferred

• Experience coordinating major-incident or outage-response activities in a federal or DoD environment, including SEV 1-3 incidents managed under defined escalation and communications procedures.
• Experience supporting a 24/7/365 network operations center, service operations center, command center, or Outage Response Team.
• Experience providing recurring incident-status updates to Government, technical, and executive stakeholders.
• Knowledge of ITIL incident, major-incident, problem, change, configuration, availability, continuity, and knowledge-management practices.
• Experience using ServiceNow or a comparable ITSM platform, and familiarity with enterprise monitoring, event-management, and observability tools.
• General knowledge of network, server, application, cloud, database, storage, LAN, WAN, and SAN operations.
• Strong crisis-coordination, communication, documentation, and decision-making skills.

Certifications

• Required: Current ITIL Foundation certification.
• Preferred: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), CompTIA Network+, or another relevant systems, networking, infrastructure, or IT operations certification.

Security Clearance

• Active Secret clearance or higher is required.

Other (Travel, Work Environment, DoD 8570 Requirements, Administrative Notes, etc.)

Work Environment / Travel

• On-site in N. Chicago, IL, five days per week (no telework).
• Supports a 24/7/365 outage-response capability; availability outside normal business hours may be required.

Administrative Notes: Period of Performance: March 1, 2027 - February 28, 2033

Contract Start Date: March 1, 2027

Note: By applying to this position, the candidate acknowledges and consents to having their resume included in an active competitive Government contract bid.