Project Manager - IT Disaster Recovery

Position Overview
Sr. Project Manager to support and mature an established enterprise Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity program.
This person will work as the IT arm of the Business Continuity Manager, coordinating complex DR activities across infrastructure, applications, databases, virtualization, networking, operations, security, architecture, and business teams.
The ideal candidate is an experienced IT Infrastructure/DR Project Manager who has personally managed disaster recovery testing, including failover and failback exercises, and understands infrastructure well enough to challenge technical teams, identify risks, and drive issues to resolution.
Key Responsibilities

• Plan, coordinate, and execute enterprise disaster recovery failover/failback testing.
• Develop and maintain the master DR testing schedule and resource plans.
• Coordinate application, server, database, network, virtualization, security, and operations teams during DR exercises.
• Track application recovery requirements, certifications, priorities, dependencies, and readiness.
• Maintain and improve DR recovery playbooks, procedures, checklists, and documentation.
• Develop repeatable DR governance processes, standards, controls, and reporting.
• Track risks, issues, dependencies, action items, and remediation activities.
• Coordinate lessons learned and drive improvements following DR exercises.
• Develop executive-level dashboards, metrics, status reports, and program communications.
• Challenge technical teams and identify gaps in recovery plans, dependencies, timelines, and recovery objectives.
• Coordinate with application owners and infrastructure teams to ensure successful recovery and return-to-production activities.
• Support automation initiatives designed to improve DR testing and recovery readiness.
• Partner with the Business Continuity Manager, PMO, IT leadership, and business stakeholders.
• Ensure program activities follow established IT governance and project management methodologies.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of IT project/program management experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience managing disaster recovery testing.
• Direct experience coordinating failover and failback exercises.
• Strong understanding of IT infrastructure, including servers, databases, virtualization, networking, storage, cloud, operations, and security.
• Experience coordinating large, cross-functional technical teams.
• Experience developing DR/BC governance, standards, checklists, processes, and controls.
• Strong executive-level reporting, dashboards, metrics, and presentation skills.
• Strong Excel skills.
• Proven ability to manage risks, issues, dependencies, resources, and competing priorities.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, stakeholder management, and organizational skills.
• Experience working in enterprise environments with formal change, incident, and governance processes.
• Ability to work after hours occasionally.  

Preferred

• PMP certification.
• Experience with SOX or other regulated environments.
• Experience with SharePoint, Azure DevOps/TFS, MS Project, and Visio.
• Experience supporting infrastructure modernization or cloud environments.
• Experience improving or maturing an existing enterprise DR/BC program.
• Agile and Waterfall project management experience.

Critical Requirement
Candidates must have actual experience managing DR testing/failover/failback exercises. General project management experience or DR documentation experience alone is not sufficient.