IT Operations & Incident Response Manager (Senior)

DecisionPoint 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., 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.

• 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.