At Wagestream, we’re on a mission to bring financial freedom to frontline workers—empowering them with fairer, more flexible financial services. We partner with some of the world’s most recognised employers—Bupa, Burger King, Greene King, and the mighty NHS—giving over 3 million employees control over their earnings, budgeting tools, savings options, and even free financial coaching. All-in-one financial wellbeing super-app.
Wagestream is unique: VC-backed and growing at scale-up pace, but with a social conscience. Some of the world's leading financial charities and impact funds were our founding investors, and we operate on a social charter - which means every product we build has to improve financial health and reduce the $5.6bn ‘premium’ lower-income earners pay for financial services each year.
You’d be joining a team of over 200 passionate, ambitious people, across Europe and the USA, building a category-leading fintech product and all united by that same mission.
The Opportunity:
Wagestream is on a mission to bring financial wellbeing to every frontline worker. As we scale, ensuring the reliability and resilience of our platform is paramount. We are looking for a foundational leader to establish and own our Incident Management practice. This is a unique opportunity for an experienced individual to build our incident response framework from the ground up, fostering a culture of operational excellence and continuous learning.
As our Head of Incident Management, you will not have direct reports initially. Instead, you will be the driving force behind creating a robust, company-wide approach to managing and learning from incidents. You will develop our processes, implement tooling, and cultivate a skilled rotational pool of volunteer Incident Commanders from across our technical teams. Your work will directly impact platform stability, customer trust, and our ability to deliver on our mission.
What will you be doing?
Build the Framework: Design, implement, and continuously improve Wagestream's end-to-end incident management lifecycle (detection, declaration, assessment, communication, resolution, and post-mortem).
Lead the Response: Act as the primary Incident Commander for major incidents, guiding technical teams to swift and safe resolution, especially as the function is established.
Empower Others: Develop and deliver comprehensive training programs to establish a confident and capable rotational pool of volunteer Incident Commanders from our Engineering and Operations teams.
Drive Continuous Improvement: Champion and facilitate blameless post-incident reviews (PIRs), ensuring that root causes or contributing factors are understood, and actionable learnings are implemented to prevent recurrence.Tooling & Automation: Evaluate, select, implement, and manage best-in-class incident management tooling (e.g., alerting, on-call scheduling, status pages, communication platforms).
Communication Clarity: Develop and maintain clear, effective communication plans for internal stakeholders (from engineering to executive leadership) and, where appropriate, external communications during incidents.
Measure What Matters: Define, track, and report on key incident management metrics (e.g., MTTA, MTTR, incident frequency, post-mortem completion rates) to demonstrate effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
Collaborate & Influence: Work closely with Engineering, SRE, Platform, Operations, and Product teams to embed reliability best practices and ensure the incident management process is understood and adopted.
Champion Resilience: Proactively identify opportunities to enhance system stability and operational resilience across Wagestream.
Our Tech Stack (for context):
- Data: PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Sigma, Redash
- Code: Python
- Infra: AWS, GitHub
(While you won't be writing code, familiarity with modern cloud environments is beneficial).
What experience might you have?
- Significant proven experience (typically 5+ years) in technical incident/service management, major incident response, or a senior SRE role with a strong incident focus, ideally within a fast-paced, cloud-native tech company.
- Deep understanding of the incident lifecycle and demonstrable experience in designing and implementing effective incident management processes and best practices.
- Exceptional leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to remain calm, command a room (virtual or physical), and make critical decisions under pressure.
- Proven ability to influence, train, and mentor technical staff in incident response without direct managerial authority.
- Experience in conducting and facilitating blameless post-incident reviews that lead to tangible improvements.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-informed approach to identifying trends and driving preventative measures.
- Familiarity with common incident management and communication tools and how to effectively integrate them (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Statuspage, Slack, Jira).
- A genuine passion for operational excellence, system reliability, and fostering a positive, learning-oriented culture around incidents.
- Humility, a proactive mindset, and an eagerness to continuously learn and adapt.
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience building or significantly maturing an incident management function.
- Experience in a fintech, payments, or other regulated industry.
- Formal certifications in incident management or related disciplines (e.g., ITIL - though practical, agile application is preferred over rigid adherence).
- Understanding of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and practices.
- Familiarity with AWS environments and modern observability stacks.
The Team:
This is a pivotal individual contributor role reporting to a senior technology leader. You will work highly cross-functionally, building strong relationships with our Engineering, Data Science, Product, and Operations teams. While you won't have direct reports to start, you will be leading by influence and expertise, building a community of practice around incident response.
Why Wagestream?
Make a Real Difference: Join a company dedicated to improving the financial lives of frontline workers.
Build from the Ground Up: This is a greenfield opportunity to shape a critical function in a rapidly growing scale-up.
Growth and Learning: We are committed to your professional development and providing opportunities to expand your skills.
Collaborative Culture: Be part of a passionate, supportive, and mission-driven team.
Salary: Dependent on experience, minimum £100,000 with no upper bound + equity
Competitive salary + equity, commensurate with experience. (We anticipate this role to align with senior leadership compensation levels).
If you're an experienced incident management professional excited by the challenge of building a world-class incident response capability, we'd love to hear from you!
What will we do for you?
- 25 Days Annual Leave in addition to public holidays (up to 5 day rollover), as well as flexible time off allowances for any ad-hoc childcare/family/caring needs
- 24 weeks' paid Maternity Leave and 4 weeks paid Paternity Leave for employees with over 12 months service
- Special Leave for In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments
- Sabbatical scheme
- Paid leave to volunteer
- Private Healthcare including comprehensive mental and physical healthcare
- Salary sacrifice to pension, as well as bonus exchange to Pension: reap even more rewards of any bonus by paying into your pension & save on Tax and NI + added compound growth
- Season Ticket Loan
- Access to Salary Sacrifice Schemes via ThanksBen: THE Benefits marketplace. Choose the benefits you want, when you want. Pay less tax, receive more value, including: Workplace nurseries, Cycle to Work, Home and Tech Scheme and more.
- The best benefit of all, access to Wagestream!
At Wagestream we celebrate and support our differences. We know employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, our product and our community to flourish. Wagestream is an equal opportunity workplace. We are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity/expression, or veteran status.
