Principal Disaster Recovery Architect

Description

The Principal Disaster Recovery Architect is accountable for the design, governance, and continuous improvement of enterprise backup and disaster recovery capabilities. This role converts Business Impact Assessment outcomes into recovery strategy and defines architecture and processes that raise reliability at scale. The Architect partners with Business Continuity leaders, platform and application owners, infrastructure and cloud teams, and risk and compliance to deliver resilient services that meet business recovery objectives. This role ensures the organization can effectively respond to and recover from disruptive events while maintaining critical operations and services.

• Partner with Internal Audit, Enterprise Risk, and Compliance to plan assessments, collect evidence, and close findings. Maintain an authoritative control narrative for disaster recovery and configuration management.
• Lead cross functional exercises and workshops to validate dependencies, recovery steps, and runbook accuracy.
• Lead regular recovery testing for tier one and tier two services including technical failover, data recovery, application restoration, and end to end business validation.
• Maintain an enterprise recovery runbook library with service mapping, dependencies, contact trees, and recovery playbooks for critical scenarios.
• Provide regular reporting to technology and business leadership on recovery readiness, configuration data health, control effectiveness, and program maturity.
• Establish architecture standards for recovery solutions such as backup and restore, active-active, active-standby, regional failover, alternate processing sites, and data protection across on-premises and cloud.
• Align contingency planning and configuration controls to relevant standards and frameworks including NIST, CIS Controls, and ITIL. Translate control requirements into policies, technical standards, and automated checks.
• Create and maintain a strategic roadmap that increases trust in disaster recovery capabilities with milestones, maturity targets, service level objectives, and measurable risk reduction.
• Coordinate disaster recovery communications plans including internal stakeholders, executives, customers, and suppliers. Ensure status reporting and post incident reviews drive improvements.
• Standardize resiliency processes and capabilities across the global enterprise including plan templates, test methods, communications, and reporting. Drive for subsidiary and international business unit integration and governance.
• Develop an enterprise disaster recovery strategy that is directly aligned to Business Impact Assessment outcomes including clear Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives and restoration priorities by business service.
• Provide executive level reporting on resilience practices aligned to common frameworks and metrics.
• Set enterprise policies for backup frequency, retention, encryption, and separation of duties and verify execution through controls and continuous monitoring.
• Drive alignment of the disaster recovery program with the greater enterprise Business Continuity plan including roles and responsibilities, escalation paths, and joint exercises.
• Manage vendor relationships for disaster recovery platforms and services. Influence product roadmaps through structured feedback.
• Define and own the information system contingency planning life cycle including plan development, training, testing and exercises, and plan maintenance.
• Mentor architects and engineers and provide guidance to application teams to embed resilient design and accurate configuration practices.
• Ensure resilient design is integrated into system development life cycle gates, change control, and release planning.

Requirements

Physical Demands: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to talk and hear; and use hands to manipulate objects or controls. The employee is regularly required to stand and walk. On occasion the incumbent may be required to stoop, bend or reach above the shoulders. The employee must occasionally lift up to 25 - 50 pounds. Specific conditions of this job are typical of frequent and continuous computer-based work requiring periods of sitting, close vision and ability to adjust focus. Occasional travel.

Work Experience

• Bachelor degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. Equivalent experience considered.
• Ten or more years in enterprise technology with deep experience in disaster recovery, business continuity, or service resilience.
• One or more of the following is strongly preferred: Certified Business Continuity Professional, ISO 22301 Lead Implementer, ITIL 4 Foundation or higher, AWS Solutions Architect or Azure Solutions Architect, CISSP or CISM.

Benefits

Training + Development

Interview process

Visa Sponsorship

Security clearance