What are the responsibilities and job description for the VP, Operational Resilience Testing Leader position at Synchrony?
JOB_POSTING-3-68111-17
Job Description
Role Summary/Purpose:
In this role you will be responsible for driving the implementation of a comprehensive operational resilience testing program that will demonstrate Synchrony’s ability to prepare, adapt, withstand, and recover from disruptions. This is a hands-on role encompassing testing program design, oversight and enforcement of program mandates, and ongoing monitoring for assessment of effectiveness and resulting risk mitigation.
As the Operational Resilience Testing Leader, you will have engagement with leaders to formalize our 1LOD approach to operational resilience testing, including requirements, approaches, and overall methodology. You will partner with relevant governance and control functions, including Information Security, Technology, Supplier Management, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management, and Risk Management to ensure implemented controls and capabilities effectively mitigate resilience risk to an acceptable level. You will also have responsibility for the coordination, communication, and needed escalation of identified resiliency risks and control remediation efforts identified through testing.
You must be a strong and disciplined leader who can manage through influence to elevate the core concepts of testing and validating resilience controls and capabilities.
Our Way of Working
We’re proud to offer you choice and flexibility. At Synchrony, our way of working allows you to have the option to work from home, near one of our Hubs or come into one of our offices. Occasionally you may be required to commute to our nearest office for in person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, training and culture events.
Essential Responsibilities
Develop Resilience Testing Strategy:
Qualifications/Requirements
The salary range for this position is 130,000.00 - 210,000.00 USD Annual and is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance.
Actual compensation offered within the posted salary range will be based upon work experience, skill level or knowledge.
Salaries are adjusted according to market in CA, NY Metro and Seattle.
Eligibility Requirements
Our Commitment
When you join us, you’ll be part of a diverse, inclusive culture where your skills, experience, and voice are not only heard—but valued. We celebrate the differences in all of us and believe that our individual, unique perspectives is what makes Synchrony truly a great place to work. Together, we’re building a future where we can all belong, connect and turn ideals into action. Through the power of our 8 Diversity Networks , with more than 60% of our workforce engaged, you’ll find community to connect with an opportunity to go beyond your passions.
This starts when you choose to apply for a role at Synchrony. We ensure all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
Reasonable Accommodation Notice
Information Technology
Job Description
Role Summary/Purpose:
In this role you will be responsible for driving the implementation of a comprehensive operational resilience testing program that will demonstrate Synchrony’s ability to prepare, adapt, withstand, and recover from disruptions. This is a hands-on role encompassing testing program design, oversight and enforcement of program mandates, and ongoing monitoring for assessment of effectiveness and resulting risk mitigation.
As the Operational Resilience Testing Leader, you will have engagement with leaders to formalize our 1LOD approach to operational resilience testing, including requirements, approaches, and overall methodology. You will partner with relevant governance and control functions, including Information Security, Technology, Supplier Management, Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, Crisis Management, and Risk Management to ensure implemented controls and capabilities effectively mitigate resilience risk to an acceptable level. You will also have responsibility for the coordination, communication, and needed escalation of identified resiliency risks and control remediation efforts identified through testing.
You must be a strong and disciplined leader who can manage through influence to elevate the core concepts of testing and validating resilience controls and capabilities.
Our Way of Working
We’re proud to offer you choice and flexibility. At Synchrony, our way of working allows you to have the option to work from home, near one of our Hubs or come into one of our offices. Occasionally you may be required to commute to our nearest office for in person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, training and culture events.
Essential Responsibilities
Develop Resilience Testing Strategy:
- Spearhead the design and implementation of a comprehensive operational resilience testing program, including scenario development, testing approach / methods, and evaluation of resilience capabilities against impact tolerance levels.
- Scenario Design: Create realistic disruption scenarios across various business functions, encompassing cyber threats, natural disasters, 3rd party disruptions, system failures, and human errors.
- Test Execution: Oversee, support, and guide the execution of operational resilience tests, including tabletop exercises, live simulations, functional tests, Joint-Supplier testing, and other testing against severe but plausible failure modes.
- Facilitate the development and maintenance of policies, standards, and procedures related to Resilience testing and communicate to appropriate stakeholders
- Provide training to properly and consistently execute resilience testing across the organization
- Analyze test results to evaluate effectiveness of resilience capabilities and overall state of readiness
- Identify vulnerabilities, assess mechanisms to prepare, adapt, withstand, and recover, and improve preparedness against a wide range of operational risks
- Prioritize areas for improvement; track improvement actions to closure and escalate findings and observations to Issues or Risks, when appropriate
- Regularly review organizational response to resiliency events, including incident / problem resolution, to evaluate and assess control enhancement opportunities to avoid recurrence and continue to raise resiliency effectiveness.
- Manage a Resilience Testing Baseline that establishes annual testing scope, and tracks progress and results in accordance with Policy and Standard expectations; Utilize a project management approach to ensure testing lifecycle actions are scheduled and achieved.
- Communicate test results, findings, identified risks, and mitigating responses to senior management, stakeholders, and relevant regulatory bodies.
- Continuous Improvement: Monitor and adapt the operational resilience testing program to address evolving risks and regulatory changes
- Contribute to the overall Program reporting of quantitative progress metrics and identifying themes, trends, and findings.
- Engage 2nd Line and Audit as required to demonstrate a controlled resilience testing/validation framework is being implemented
Qualifications/Requirements
- 10 years of experience in a technology risk, control, or audit function in a regulated environment, preferably within the financial services industry.
- Demonstrated experience with Operational Resiliency, business continuity, disaster recovery, security incident response, and/or Technology Risk Management.
- Strong influencing skills, comfortable executing against recommendations and plans by overcoming barriers and resistance.
- Demonstrated experience leading the implementation and assessment of technology, security, and resiliency frameworks, e.g., FFIEC, NIST, DORA, or similar. \
- Strong analytical skills and the ability to evaluate risk/reward tradeoffs appropriate to maintain alignment with defined risk appetite.
- Proven experience handling multiple and competing priorities across all stakeholder groups and effectively navigating with minimal disruption.
- Proven experience with partnering, collaborating, and influencing across a large, complex organization.
- Results-oriented; ready to challenge the status quo for continuous improvement.
- Action- and detail-oriented with excellent organizational and prioritization skills.
- Certifications from Business Continuity Institute (BCI) or Disaster Recovery Institute (Drii)
- Experience working in a highly regulated environment, e.g., OCC, FRB
- Resilience testing experience in the Public Cloud, including familiarity with Cloud validation tools (e.g., AWS Resilience Hub and Fault Injection Service)
- Resilience testing experience against cyber scenarios (e.g., Ransomware, Data corruption)
- Conceptual understanding of chaos testing and use cases for validating Resilience
- Independent worker with awareness of when to escalate and engage others.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially translating between regulatory and technical terminology.
- Proven experience executing with accuracy, on time and while dealing with ambiguity.
- Demonstrated commitment to continuous improvement.
- Demonstrated risk management mindset and behavior.
The salary range for this position is 130,000.00 - 210,000.00 USD Annual and is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance.
Actual compensation offered within the posted salary range will be based upon work experience, skill level or knowledge.
Salaries are adjusted according to market in CA, NY Metro and Seattle.
Eligibility Requirements
- You must be 18 years or older
- You must have a high school diploma or equivalent
- You must be willing to take a drug test, submit to a background investigation and submit fingerprints as part of the onboarding process
- You must be able to satisfy the requirements of Section 19 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act.
- New hires (Level 4-7) must have 9 months of continuous service with the company before they are eligible to post on other roles. Once this new hire time in position requirement is met, the associate will have a minimum 6 months’ time in position before they can post for future non-exempt roles. Employees, level 8 or greater, must have at least 18 months’ time in position before they can post. All internal employees must consistently meet performance expectations and have approval from your manager to post (or the approval of your manager and HR if you don’t meet the time in position or performance expectations).
Our Commitment
When you join us, you’ll be part of a diverse, inclusive culture where your skills, experience, and voice are not only heard—but valued. We celebrate the differences in all of us and believe that our individual, unique perspectives is what makes Synchrony truly a great place to work. Together, we’re building a future where we can all belong, connect and turn ideals into action. Through the power of our 8 Diversity Networks , with more than 60% of our workforce engaged, you’ll find community to connect with an opportunity to go beyond your passions.
This starts when you choose to apply for a role at Synchrony. We ensure all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.
Reasonable Accommodation Notice
- Federal law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities. Please tell us if you require a reasonable accommodation to apply for a job or to perform your job. Examples of reasonable accommodation include making a change to the application process or work procedures, providing documents in an alternate format, using a sign language interpreter, or using specialized equipment.
- If you need special accommodations, please call our Career Support Line so that we can discuss your specific situation. We can be reached at 1-866-301-5627. Representatives are available from 8am – 5pm Monday to Friday, Central Standard Time
Information Technology
