Operational Resilience Manager

Job summary

Put your career on the map
Salary: £60,013-£74,620
Pension: 28.97% of base salary (RoS contribution)
Annual Leave: 42 days annual holiday,
Duration: Permanent
Working Pattern: 35 hours per week. We are a flexible employer and will consider a variety of working patterns.
Location: Hybrid working with regular attendance in Edinburgh or Glasgow as required
Grade: C1
Closing date: 1 March at 11.59pm
Number of vacancies: 1

Registers of Scotland (RoS)
Join an award-winning organisation recognised for its technology and innovation. Registers of Scotland is a world-leading pioneer in land and property registration. Our full-stack teams design, architect, and build all our registration products in-house. We work to create digital solutions for the people of Scotland. You will get an opportunity to nurture your creativity and develop with us through access to the latest data, software engineering and product delivery techniques.

Job description

The Role
As Operational Resilience Manager, you will lead the strategic development and delivery of resilience capability across Registers of Scotland, ensuring the organisation can continue to provide trusted, high-quality public services during disruption. You will strengthen resilience across digital services, registration operations, data services, estates and critical suppliers, safeguarding the integrity and availability of Scotland’s land and property information. Working collaboratively with colleagues across Digital, Risk, Cyber and Business teams, as well as external partners, you will embed a culture of preparedness and ensure robust business continuity and recovery arrangements are in place and regularly tested. This is a unique opportunity to establish and lead a new resilience function, driving organisation-wide improvements in service uptime, recovery performance, supplier assurance and incident response. Your work will play a vital role in protecting the property market, maintaining citizen trust, and ensuring RoS can respond and recover quickly under any conditions.

Key outcomes over the next 12–24 months include:

• Leading an organisation-wide assessment of resilience maturity across critical services and processes and defining a long-term resilience strategy and delivery plan
• Establishing up-to-date, tested and assured business continuity and recovery plans focused on end-to-end business-critical services
• Demonstrating strengthened resilience across core services such as Digital Submissions
• Improving resilience indicators, including uptime, recovery test results and supplier assurance scores
• Delivering effective performance during real incidents with strong stakeholder feedback
• Achieving positive audit outcomes and driving continuous improvement of controls and practices

On a typical day you will…

• Accountable for setting and delivering the organisation-wide resilience strategy and embedding a resilience culture across the business
• Lead the identification, mapping, and management of business-critical services to ensure continuity under all conditions
• Establish and chair resilience governance structures (steering groups, working groups, programme boards) to ensure senior leadership engagement and continuous improvement
• Collaborate with internal teams (Digital, Product, Cloud Platforms, Cyber Security, Operations, Risk, Estates, Communications) and external partners (cloud providers, digital suppliers, Scottish Government, auditors) to embed resilience into systems, services, and supplier arrangements
• Provide independent assurance and strategic oversight of business resilience, including disaster recovery planning, failover testing, and supplier continuity validation
• Coordinate scenario testing and exercises for prioritised threat scenarios (e.g., cyber disruption, supplier outages) and embed lessons learned
• Lead or support multi-disciplinary responses during major incidents impacting operations or digital services, including post-incident reviews and structured lessons learned
• Produce clear, evidence-based reporting for executive management and governance groups on resilience posture, risks, incidents, and testing outcomes
• Maintain operational resilience frameworks, contribute to the Corporate Risk Register, and ensure alignment with governance, Audit & Risk Committee expectations, and internal audit recommendations
• Embed continuous improvement practices across resilience activities, including scenario testing, supplier assurance, and service recovery planning

Person specification

Key Responsibilities
Essential Criteria – Skills and Attributes for Success

Technical:
We will assess you against the following Experience and Technical skills during the application and assessment process

• Develop, operate, and embed operational resilience, business continuity, incident management, and digital service operations
• Align resilience, continuity, and recovery practices with relevant standards, including ISO 22301 and the NCSC Cyber Assessment Framework
• Own and maintain Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) and service recovery playbooks, ensuring compliance with ISO 22301 and Scottish Government expectations
• Coordinate and deliver scenario testing and exercises (table-top, simulation, live), embedding lessons learned to strengthen service continuity
• Act as a key member of the Incident Management Team during major incidents or disruptions
• Hold professional qualifications or training in business continuity, disaster recovery, or resilience (e.g., CBCI/MBCI), ITIL Foundation or higher, ISO 22301 Lead Implementer/Auditor, or training in incident command/emergency response frameworks (gold/silver/bronze)

Experience:

• Experience developing, operating and embedding operational resilience, business continuity, incident management or digital service operations (not solely providing support)
• Experience working within cloud-first or complex digital environments, such as Infrastructure as Code, microservices architectures, automated deployments, cloud-native or hybrid/on-premises services
• Experience coordinating and delivering strategically focused scenario testing and exercising, business continuity or disruption recovery activities, and embedding lessons learned into service improvements
• Experience managing third-party and supply-chain resilience, including mapping dependencies beyond immediate teams or business units
• Demonstrated experience leading or coordinating responses to major service incidents or operational disruptions
• Experience working with audits, risk assurance or governance groups, providing evidence and assurance on resilience or service performance

Behaviours
At application stage, you will be scored against the bolded Behaviours and against all Behaviours for the assessment:

Making Effective Decisions – strategy, risk assessment, incident leadership.
Managing a Quality Service – delivering high-quality, trusted services and assurance.
Leadership – embedding culture, influencing senior stakeholders, leading multi-disciplinary teams.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £60,013, Registers of Scotland contributes £17,385 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• This job is for you if you want…

  Work with purpose: working for the people of Scotland to set the bar for land and property registration worldwide.

  Flexible and hybrid working: depending on the role and team requirements, work when and where it’s best for you and your stakeholders.

  Benefits: enjoy pay progression, pension contributions of up to 28.97%, up to a year’s parental leave, and 42 days annual holiday.

  Investment in professional development: we invest in all our people so that they have the right skills to be productive and confident in their job.

  Diversity and Inclusion: We are an ‘Investor in People’ and a ‘Disability Confident’ employer. We are inclusive, stronger together, and committed to putting our people first.

  Positive work culture: RoS is an agile, digital organisation using leading-edge technology. Colleagues understand their role in achieving our strategy and have the autonomy to deliver.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

Stage one - Application Process
To apply, click on 'Apply now' and complete the online application form.
You will need to submit:

• A CV outlining your career history and how you meet the technical criteria (max 4 pages).
• A Statement of suitability (500-1000 words) detailing how you meet the Making Effective Decisions behaviour and experience criteria for the role. Please use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) in your examples.
• Your CV and Supporting statement should be submitted as a single MS Word file.

Please note:

• If we receive a high volume of applications, we may complete an initial sift on Technical Criteria
• We reserve the right to invite candidates to participate in a telephone interview prior to being further assessed.
• Applications that are not accompanied by CVs will not be scored or statements over 1000 words will not be considered.
• We would strongly recommend that your statement is written in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action & Result) and suggest preparing your answers using software such as MS Word or Google Docs, and then uploading the file.
• We strongly advise you review our policy on responsible use of AI in the application process. RoS may check answers with an AI detection tool and will contact you for a pre-screening call to verify your responses.
• Applications and appointments are subject to a strict merit-based assessment process, in line with the Civil Service Recruitment Principles.

Stage two – assessment
If successful at application stage, you will be invited to an in-person interview which will include the following:

• Pre-prepared Presentation Exercise
• Case study applied exercise completed on the day

Information on Success Profiles
For further information on success profiles, visit our Success Profiles.

Feedback
Feedback will only be provided if you progress to interview stage.

Reserve List
In the event that further posts are required, a reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for up to 12 months.

Nationality and immigration status
In general, only nationals from the following countries (and associations of countries) are eligible for employment in the Civil Service: the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and the Commonwealth. EU nationals (with settled or pre-settled status), certain EEA nationals, Swiss and Turkish nationals are also eligible for employment. Detailed provisions on determining eligibility on the grounds of nationality and, where relevant, immigration status can be reviewed here.

Security
Successful candidates must undergo a Level 1 Disclosure check.
Individuals working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard checks.

Equality, diversity and inclusion
As a proud member of the Disability Confident Scheme, we welcome applications from disabled candidates. We’re not as diverse as we’d like yet, and we’re working on it. We especially welcome applications from underrepresented groups – people who are disabled, minoritised ethnic groups, and younger people (16-24 years of age). To learn more please see our EDI strategy.

As part of the application process, we would like to invite you to please complete our diversity monitoring form. This information is not shared with recruitment panels.

If you require any adjustments to our recruitment process, please let us know via talent@ros.gov.uk. Please see this page for more information on adjustments.
Further information
For further information relating to RoS, including:
Additional details on pay & benefits
The Civil Service Code
Complaints process
Use of AI in the application/recruitment process,
Please view our additional information page online.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : talent@ros.gov.uk
• Email : talent@ros.gov.uk
• Telephone : talent@ros.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : talent@ros.gov.uk