Senior Crisis Management Specialist

We're Hiring: Senior Crisis Management Specialist

Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience Level: Senior

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a globally focused organization committed to maintaining operational resilience, business continuity, organizational preparedness, and effective response capabilities across diverse markets.

Our teams collaborate across Enterprise Risk, Business Continuity, Security, Health & Safety, Operations, Technology, Communications, Legal, Human Resources, Facilities, and executive leadership to prepare for disruptive events and protect people, assets, services, information, and organizational reputation.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Crisis Management Specialist to lead crisis preparedness, response planning, crisis exercises, incident coordination, emergency communications, and organizational resilience activities.

The ideal candidate will establish robust crisis-management frameworks, assess emerging threats, coordinate cross-functional response teams, develop crisis scenarios and response plans, facilitate exercises, and support leadership during significant incidents. The role will strengthen the organization's ability to anticipate, respond to, recover from, and learn from major disruptions.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain enterprise crisis-management strategies, frameworks, policies, standards, and procedures.
• Establish crisis-management governance aligned with organizational risk appetite and resilience objectives.
• Develop crisis-management roles, responsibilities, escalation structures, authorities, and decision-making protocols.
• Maintain a comprehensive crisis and major-incident management framework covering prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and lessons learned.
• Identify and assess potential crisis scenarios affecting people, operations, facilities, technology, supply chains, customers, reputation, and business continuity.
• Conduct enterprise crisis-risk assessments and identify vulnerabilities, dependencies, and response gaps.
• Develop and maintain crisis scenarios, threat assessments, impact assessments, and response playbooks.
• Establish crisis classification, severity levels, escalation thresholds, and activation criteria.
• Define clear procedures for activating crisis-management teams and response structures.
• Coordinate crisis-management activities across business units, functions, regions, and operating locations.
• Establish and maintain crisis-management teams, command structures, contact lists, and alternates.
• Define roles for executive leadership, crisis teams, incident-management teams, communications, operations, technology, security, legal, and other critical functions.
• Develop and maintain crisis-management plans, emergency-response plans, major-incident procedures, and recovery strategies.
• Ensure crisis plans are aligned with business continuity, disaster recovery, emergency management, security, and operational resilience frameworks.
• Review business continuity and disaster recovery plans from an enterprise crisis-management perspective.
• Coordinate crisis-response plans for natural disasters, severe weather, cyber incidents, technology outages, security events, supply-chain disruptions, health emergencies, regulatory events, reputational crises, and other major disruptions.
• Develop scenario-specific response playbooks for high-impact and high-likelihood events.
• Establish crisis decision-making frameworks, escalation matrices, communication protocols, and executive briefing procedures.
• Coordinate crisis communications with Corporate Communications, Public Affairs, Legal, Human Resources, Customer Experience, and relevant business teams.
• Develop internal and external crisis communication procedures, templates, holding statements, notification protocols, and approval workflows.
• Ensure crisis communications are timely, accurate, coordinated, and appropriate to the severity and audience of the incident.
• Maintain crisis communication contact lists, stakeholder maps, notification trees, and emergency communication channels.
• Coordinate crisis notification and escalation activities across relevant stakeholders.
• Monitor emerging incidents, threats, geopolitical developments, severe weather, security events, and other factors that could trigger organizational disruption.
• Establish processes for crisis monitoring, early warning, escalation, and situational awareness.
• Assess incoming incident information and determine potential business impact and escalation requirements.
• Provide leadership with timely situation reports, risk assessments, decision options, and recommended actions.
• Support executive decision-making during active crises through structured information, analysis, and coordination.
• Coordinate crisis-management meetings, command-center activities, briefings, action tracking, and decision logs.
• Establish mechanisms for maintaining accurate situational awareness throughout crisis events.
• Track incident actions, owners, deadlines, decisions, dependencies, and outstanding risks.
• Coordinate cross-functional response activities and ensure critical actions are assigned and monitored.
• Support the establishment and operation of crisis-management or emergency command centers where required.
• Define requirements for crisis-management technology, collaboration platforms, emergency notification systems, and situational-awareness tools.
• Maintain crisis-management systems, contact databases, notification platforms, and response documentation.
• Conduct regular crisis exercises, simulations, tabletop exercises, drills, and scenario-based testing.
• Develop realistic crisis exercise scenarios based on organizational risk assessments and emerging threats.
• Design exercise objectives, injects, evaluation criteria, participant roles, and expected outcomes.
• Facilitate tabletop exercises and executive crisis simulations.
• Coordinate full-scale, functional, technical, or cross-functional exercises where appropriate.
• Evaluate crisis exercise performance and identify capability gaps, decision-making weaknesses, communication issues, and coordination challenges.
• Develop post-exercise reports, lessons learned, corrective actions, and improvement plans.
• Track exercise findings through remediation and verify closure of significant gaps.
• Establish crisis-management training and awareness programs for executives, managers, employees, and response teams.
• Develop crisis-management training materials, quick-reference guides, escalation procedures, and response checklists.
• Conduct regular awareness sessions to ensure stakeholders understand their crisis roles and responsibilities.
• Coordinate with Business Continuity teams to ensure crisis plans align with continuity strategies and recovery priorities.
• Coordinate with Technology and Disaster Recovery teams on major technology disruption and cyber crisis scenarios.
• Work with Security teams on physical security incidents, threats, evacuations, hostile events, and other security-related crises.
• Work with Health & Safety teams on serious incidents, workplace emergencies, injuries, and public safety events.
• Coordinate with Facilities and Operations teams on building disruptions, infrastructure failures, access issues, and operational emergencies.
• Work with Supply Chain and Procurement teams to assess and manage supplier and logistics disruptions.

Key Performance Indicators

• Crisis-management plan completion
• Crisis plan review completion
• Crisis plan currency
• Critical scenario coverage
• Crisis-risk assessment completion
• Crisis scenario coverage
• Crisis readiness score
• Crisis capability maturity
• Crisis exercise completion
• Exercise participation rate
• Executive exercise participation
• Exercise objective achievement
• Exercise finding identification
• Exercise corrective-action closure
• Crisis training completion
• Crisis awareness coverage
• Crisis notification accuracy
• Crisis notification response rate
• Crisis escalation timeliness
• Crisis activation time
• Crisis response time
• Crisis command-center activation time
• Incident assessment timeliness
• Situation-report timeliness
• Executive briefing timeliness
• Crisis decision-log completeness
• Crisis action tracking completion
• Critical action closure rate
• Crisis communication effectiveness
• Crisis communication approval time
• Stakeholder notification compliance
• Emergency contact-list accuracy
• Crisis contact coverage
• Crisis response team availability
• Crisis role assignment coverage
• Critical dependency coverage
• Third-party crisis readiness
• Business continuity alignment
• Disaster recovery alignment
• Crisis plan testing frequency
• Repeat exercise finding rate
• Major incident lessons-learned implementation
• Crisis remediation completion
• Crisis-management audit compliance
• Regulatory compliance
• Crisis management stakeholder satisfaction
• Overall improvement in organizational resilience

Ideal Candidate

The successful candidate should have strong experience in crisis management, business continuity, operational resilience, emergency management, enterprise risk, incident management, security, or organizational resilience, preferably within a complex, multinational, regulated, or geographically distributed organization.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong understanding of crisis-management principles, frameworks, and response methodologies.
• Proven experience developing and implementing enterprise crisis-management programs.
• Experience developing crisis-management plans, playbooks, response procedures, and escalation frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of incident classification, crisis activation, escalation, command structures, and decision-making processes.
• Experience coordinating cross-functional crisis response teams.