Senior Incident Management Specialist

Get to Know Our Team

The Customer Experience Group (CEG) Incident Management (IM) team at Agoda plays a critical role in ensuring operational continuity during unexpected events affecting our customers and partners. We manage the response to a wide range of technical and non-technical incidents including natural disasters, political unrest, global health emergencies, travel disruptions, and regulatory, pricing or product changes. Our team coordinates cross-functional stakeholders, develops response strategies, and implements mitigation measures to minimize impact on our customers, partners, and business operations. We are the central team with CEG that translates chaotic situations into organized, effective responses.

Role Overview

As a Senior Incident Management Specialist, you will lead Agoda's response to complex incidents that impact our customers, partners, and business operations. You will be responsible for rapidly assessing emerging situations, coordinating cross-functional teams, developing strategic response plans, and ensuring clear communication throughout the incident lifecycle with all involved parties. You will serve as the driver in CEG for incidents with technical and non-technical teams and business stakeholders, ensuring everyone understands impact, priorities, and resolution progress during these events.

This role requires exceptional leadership in ambiguous, high-pressure situations where you must make decisive judgments based on limited information and manage emotions of multiple individuals with competing priorities, often on very tight timelines. You will own end-to-end incident management from initial detection through resolution and post-incident analysis (lessons learned), ensuring we continuously improve our response capabilities.

Most critically, this role requires you to drive ownership and accountability for action items during and after incidents to prevent future recurrences. Your ability to translate insights into concrete improvements across teams will be essential for strengthening our operational resilience.

You must be able to host incident calls (war rooms) to coordinate stakeholders across different business functions, whilst maintaining laser focus on immediate mitigation while simultaneously driving longer-term solutions. As such, you must be comfortable and exceptional at influencing stakeholders. The ability to navigate organizational dynamics, gain commitment from teams without direct authority, and ensure participants remain engaged and accountable throughout the incident lifecycle is a must. You must be able to think critically and challenge conventional approaches, asking questions to identify further problems or connections.

Core Responsibilities

• Lead and coordinate Agoda's CEG response to incidents impacting customers, partners and/or CEG’s ability to maintain operational stability. This includes natural disasters, system outages, platform issues, political events, global health emergencies, or configuration issues (pricing, promotion, etc.) affecting our customers, partners, and internal operations.

• Rapidly assess incident severity/classification and impact scope, establish structured incident command, define clear stakeholder roles, and develop comprehensive response strategies that balance customer experience with business requirements.

• Host and facilitate effective war rooms during critical incidents, ensuring focused mitigation efforts while maintaining stakeholder engagement and driving consensus on complex decisions with limited information.

• Design and implement communication frameworks for different audience types (SLT, frontline, customers, partners) that provide appropriate transparency and actionable updates throughout the incident lifecycle.

• Conduct thorough root cause analysis sessions (lessons learned) that identify systemic vulnerabilities, transform incidents into organizational learning opportunities, and drive accountability for preventative actions across teams.

• Develop and maintain comprehensive incident documentation, including incident updates, reports, timelines, action trackers, and lessons learned that capture essential context, insights and future actions.

• Create and regularly update incident response playbooks, communication templates, and decision frameworks that enable swift, consistent responses to recurring incident types.

• Analyze incident patterns and trends using data visualization and analytical techniques to identify emerging risks, recurring issues, and opportunities for proactive intervention.

• Establish strategic relationships with key stakeholders across Agoda, Booking Holdings sister companies, and external partners to strengthen coordination capabilities during incidents.

• Challenge conventional thinking and apply creative problem-solving approaches that reveal innovative solutions to complex incident scenarios.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to stakeholders on effective incident response techniques, ensuring organizational capability development beyond the immediate team.

The candidate should meet the following requirements

• 5+ years of experience in incident management, crisis response, business continuity, or operations management, preferably in the travel, e-commerce, or technology sectors.

• Hands-on experience with Jira Service Management or similar ITSM tooling.

• Exceptional communication skills with an ability to craft clear, concise messaging tailored to different audience types, from technical teams to executive leadership in English.

• Strong facilitation abilities for leading structured discussions, war rooms, and post-incident reviews to drive measurable outcomes.

• Adaptability and resilience in high-pressure situations with the ability to maintain clear thinking and effective decision-making during prolonged incident response.

• Analytical mindset with capacity to identify patterns across incidents, recognize systemic issues, and translate insights into actionable improvement recommendations.

• SQL knowledge is a must have as this role requires significant data extraction, review and presentation to support data-driven decision making. Experience with data analysis and visualization techniques is essential.

• Excellent listening and negotiation skills, a critical thinker with attention to detail – are key components of the role.

• Ability to work both in a highly diversified team environment and autonomously, with a high degree of integrity and confidentiality.

• Knowledge of formal incident management methodologies (ITIL, NIMS, ICS) and business continuity frameworks.

• Demonstrate flexibility in working hours as required by the business, given the role may require working fixed and rotational shifts supporting a 24x7 model.

Not required but good to have

• Project management experience, demonstrating the ability to track multiple workstreams and dependencies.

• Experience creating and delivering training or simulation exercises to build organizational response capabilities.

Working Hours

As the team and operations continue to scale, the role will require the need to support a 24/7 operating model within a hybrid RTO model.

Location

We welcome applications from employees based in Cairo (Egypt) or Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) supporting the core hours mentioned above. No relocation/visa support will be provided for this role.