Operational Resilience Head of Integrated Testing

Overview

Operational Resilience Americas Department enables the bank to effectively manage business threats and mitigate the risk of disruptions. The department ensures the readiness of each entity, as well as the ability to respond adequately to disruptive events, minimizing the impact on the delivery of services supporting the bank's critical operations. As part of Mizuho Americas' ongoing efforts to build a more resilient organization, this role establishes, leads, and matures the Integrated Testing function within Operational Resilience.

• Integrated Testing Leadership
  • Define and lead the Integrated Testing strategy within the Operational Resilience program, covering capability, disaster recovery, third‑party, data, and scenario‑based exercises at the asset, application, and process levels.
  • Design and operate a testing‑as‑a‑service delivery model with clearly defined service level agreements, intake procedures, and engagement standards for stakeholders across the three lines of defense.
  • Establish a multi‑year testing roadmap aligned to the firm’s critical operations, impact tolerances, and regulatory commitments, including extension of the DR test window over multiple consecutive days to demonstrate the firm’s ability to withstand severe business disruptions and operate during extended outages such as cyber events.
  • Provide testing services of the Operational Resilience functions to ensure data quality and controls effectiveness.
• Disaster Recovery and Scenario Testing
  • Lead the DR Testing Program, including test strategy designed to address the threat landscape and critical third parties, stakeholder engagement, test planning (scope, objectives, success criteria, assumptions), test scripts, test day execution and coordination, and post‑test reporting.
  • Oversee data center loss exercises, failover and failback validation, cyber recovery exercises, and integrated cross‑entity scenarios spanning Americas operations and relevant global affiliates.
  • Drive issue management arising from testing, including prioritization, action plans, ownership, and target dates, with escalation paths to senior management.
• Integrated Exercises at Asset and Process Levels
  • Coordinate asset‑level (application, infrastructure, facility) and process‑level (business service, critical operation) exercises, ensuring alignment with RTO, RPO, MTD and impact tolerance objectives.
  • Integrate third‑party testing, including ascertaining contractual testing requirements of third parties supporting critical operations and facilitating joint testing with BCM, DR, and TPRM teams.
  • Coordinate tabletop exercises, crisis simulations, and severe but plausible scenario testing that span business, technology, vendor, and crisis management dimensions.
• Governance, Reporting, and Regulatory Engagement
  • Maintain DR and testing policies, standards, and procedures, ensuring alignment with senior leadership expectations, regulatory oversight and reporting requirements, and audit reviews and continuous monitoring.
  • Define and report Key Risk Indicators, Key Performance Indicators, and compliance metrics to provide insights for decision making by the Operational Resilience leadership team and senior management.
  • Serve as the primary point of contact for regulators, internal audit, and independent assessments on testing matters, ensuring audit‑defensible documentation and remediation of findings.
  • Ensure alignment with applicable regulatory frameworks, including FFIEC IT Handbook, Federal Reserve SR 20‑24, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision principles for operational resilience, OCC and FDIC guidance, CFTC 23.603, PRA and FCA expectations, and the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act where relevant to affiliated entities.
• Operating Model, Talent, and Tools
  • Build and lead the Integrated Testing team, defining roles, responsibilities, and career paths; recruit, develop, and retain talent with the required technical and business expertise.
  • Define the operating model and RACI with key stakeholders across IT, TPRM, BRM, BCM, Cyber, and the lines of business.
  • Deploy and optimise tools to enable planning, execution, issue management, and reporting,…