W2 Only (No C2C) :: New York, NY (Hybrid, Local Candidates Only – 2 or 3 days Onsite/Week) :: Senior IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery (DR) SME ; G.C / U.S.C

Senior IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery (DR) SME ; G.C / U.S.C

12+Months

New York, NY (Hybrid, Local Candidates Only – 2 or 3 days Onsite/Week)

W2 Only (No C2C) :: Important: Only local candidates from New York (NY) and New Jersey (NJ) who can commute to the onsite location in Manhattan, NYC, please apply. Candidates must be available to work onsite 3–4 days per week. No out-of-state candidates, please.

Role Summary:
Lead the end-to-end design, validation, and testing of disaster recovery and operational resilience capabilities for critical applications, partnering closely with business and technology teams (primarily in Spanish) to ensure RTO/RPO objectives are achievable and evidenced.

Key Responsibilities:
- Define and validate DR strategies for critical services, aligning recovery tiers, patterns, and controls with business impact and RTO/RPO targets.
- Assess current-state recovery capabilities across infrastructure, platforms, data, and applications; perform gap analyses and produce actionable remediation roadmaps.
- Design a DR testing framework, including test scenarios, acceptance criteria, data integrity checks, business validation steps, and readiness gates.
- Map application and data dependencies; define recovery sequencing, failover/failback flows, runbooks, and orchestration requirements to ensure technical feasibility.
- Advise on resiliency standards, governance, policy, and evidence management to meet audit and regulatory expectations.
- Establish KPIs/KRIs for resilience (e.g., recovery attainment, test pass rates, defect density, evidence completeness) and drive continuous improvement.
- Partner with architecture, platform, cybersecurity, and business continuity teams to embed resilience by design and ensure operational handover.
- Lead cross-country collaboration with Mexico-based teams; facilitate workshops, walkthroughs, and executive updates in Spanish and English.

Required Qualifications:
- 8–12+ years in IT Resilience/BCDR, DR architecture, or service continuity for complex, distributed systems.
- Proven experience delivering DR strategies and test programs for mission-critical applications across hybrid environments (on-prem, VMware, cloud).
- Strong knowledge of RTO/RPO design, data protection and replication (e.g., SQL AG, Oracle Data Guard/GoldenGate, SRDF/S, SnapMirror, Kafka/MQ DR), backup/restore (e.g., Commvault, NetBackup, Rubrik), and failover orchestration (e.g., VMware SRM, Zerto, scripting/Automation).
- Hands-on in dependency mapping and service modeling (e.g., CMDB/ServiceNow), runbook development, and recovery sequencing.
- Familiarity with resilience frameworks and standards (e.g., ISO 22301/27031, NIST SP 800-34, ITIL) and operational resilience practices.
- Excellent documentation, stakeholder management, and facilitation skills with the ability to challenge and validate assumptions.
- Language: Spanish (C1/C2) and English (professional proficiency).

Preferred Experience:
- Financial services, payments, or other highly regulated industries; exposure to regulatory expectations for operational resilience.
- Cloud resilience patterns on AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform (e.g., multi-AZ/region, pilot-light/warm standby, chaos testing).
- Mainframe or large ERP recovery (e.g., SAP), container/Kubernetes DR, or SRE/chaos engineering practices.
- Certifications: CBCP/MBCI, ITIL, and/or cloud architect certifications.

Key Deliverables:
- Enterprise DR and recovery strategy with service-level patterns and standards.
- Application-level recovery design, dependency maps, and validated runbooks.
- Gap analysis with prioritized remediation plan and timeline.
- DR test plan and schedule, test evidence, and remediation tracking.
- Governance artifacts, metrics dashboards, and audit-ready documentation.

Work Arrangement:
- Collaborates daily with Mexico-based teams; ability to work across time zones with occasional travel as needed.