The Backup and Recovery Specialist, Senior leads the architecture and governance of enterprise backup and recovery services that protect large, complex environments supporting mission-critical systems in a federal IT setting. This role owns the overall health, scalability, and resiliency of backup platforms, guiding design decisions for new workloads and disaster recovery strategies. The specialist acts as the highest-level escalation point for severe backup failures and high-risk restoration activities while partnering with security, infrastructure, and application teams to align data protection capabilities with organizational risk tolerance and regulatory obligations.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and govern end-to-end backup and recovery solutions, including policy standards, tiered storage, off-site replication, and integration with disaster recovery frameworks.
- Define and enforce enterprise backup governance covering retention strategies, protection tiers, service catalogs, and recovery testing requirements.
- Lead complex, multi-platform restore operations and large-scale recovery efforts, including cross-site failover and disaster recovery execution.
- Conduct risk and impact assessments for data protection, identify gaps in recoverability, and drive remediation roadmaps and technology refresh initiatives.
- Coordinate and lead recovery exercises for mission-critical systems, capturing metrics such as achieved recovery time and recovery point to improve runbooks and readiness.
- Serve as platform or service owner for backup and resiliency services, influencing technology selection, roadmap, and integration across the enterprise.
- Collaborate with cybersecurity and infrastructure teams to ensure backup strategies align with security controls, regulatory requirements, and business continuity objectives.
- Mentor and guide mid-level and junior backup specialists, establishing standards, runbooks, and best practices for operations, automation, and documentation.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
- 8+ years of specialized experience in data backup and recovery, backup engineering, storage architecture, or disaster recovery leadership roles.
- Expert-level knowledge of enterprise backup and recovery platforms supporting hybrid on-premises and cloud environments.
- Demonstrated experience defining and implementing enterprise backup governance, standards, and integration with broader disaster recovery programs.
- Proven success leading complex restoration efforts and high-impact recovery events in mission-critical environments.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills, with the ability to brief leadership and collaborate across technical and business teams.
- Active Secret clearance or ability to obtain and maintain the required investigation level.
- U.S. citizenship required.
Preferred Qualifications
- Advanced certifications such as Veritas Certified Specialist, Veeam Certified Engineer, CommVault certification, CISSP, or related credentials.
- Experience acting as service owner for backup and resiliency services in large enterprises or regulated government environments.
- Background evaluating and integrating emerging data protection technologies such as snapshot-based backups, continuous data protection, and cloud-native backup services.
- Experience designing metrics, dashboards, and KPIs that measure backup effectiveness, recovery readiness, and compliance posture for leadership.