Job Description
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.