Senior Staff Engineer - Data and Cyber Recovery

Role: Sr. Staff Engineer

Location: Milpitas/Irvine (Hybrid 2-3) days remote

Type: 6 month contract to hire

Partner Rate: 160-165/hr

Interview Process: 2 step process ( 1- Interview with Sr. Director, 2- Interview with Team/other leaders)

Competition: Sent out to 2-3 other vendors, but we are the first ones to hear about it.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This role answers the hardest question an executive can ask: after a destructive cyber event, what exactly can we get back, how fast, and how do we know. You own the engineering of immutable backup, isolated recovery environments and orchestrated restore for tier one systems.

The capability has to be engineered to a recovery objective rather than procured to a vendor feature list. You will own the technical evaluation and recommendation for the cyber recovery platform, and then build and prove the capability you recommended. Proof is a successful restore. It is never a successful backup job.

You will be building something that does not exist here today, which is the appeal of the role and also the difficulty of it.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Architect cyber recovery. Immutable backup, air gapped or logically isolated vaulting, and the clean room recovery environment in which tier one systems are rebuilt after a destructive event.
• Own the platform decision. Lead the technical evaluation and recommendation for the cyber recovery platform, on engineering merit against recovery objectives.
• Sequence the restore. Recovery sequencing across the dependency chain. Identity and management planes before the workloads that depend on them.
• Set the backup standard. Define the retention and immutability standard the storage and backup team builds to.
• Engineer data tier resilience. Replication, high availability and recovery point design across two production data centres for the data underpinning factory critical systems.
• Run the restore yourself. Engineer the capability and personally execute the clean room restore, producing evidence that holds up to audit scrutiny.
• Hold suppliers to the objective. Hold vendors and the managed service provider to the recovery objectives directly, and provide technical direction to storage and backup engineers.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

We are looking for the right capability rather than a specific number of years. The experience indication below is typical, not a filter; an engineer who has genuinely done this work in less time will be considered. The cyber recovery requirement below is the exception and is not negotiable.

• Typically ten or more years in data protection, storage and recovery engineering at enterprise scale.
• Direct hands on experience engineering cyber recovery: immutable backup, an isolated recovery environment, and orchestrated restore following a destructive event. This requirement is not negotiable.
• You have executed a full scale recovery exercise and produced evidence against a defined recovery objective.
• Database resilience fluency: replication, high availability, and recovery point trade offs.
• You can present a technical risk position to executive and audit level audiences without softening it.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• You have worked a real ransomware or destructive event recovery.
• Manufacturing environment with production cost downtime exposure.
• Recognised external standing in data protection or cyber recovery.

LEVEL EXPECTATIONS

• Works across teams on ambiguous problems that have no established playbook.
• Leads adoption of a technology capability the organisation does not currently hold.
• Establishes standards that are adopted beyond the immediate team.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST TWELVE MONTHS