Backup Disaster Recovery Engine

Role Overview

As a Backup Disaster Recovery Engineer, you will play a critical role in safeguarding the organization’s most vital data and systems against potential threats such as data loss, corruption, or catastrophic outages. Your primary responsibility will be to design, implement, and maintain robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions that ensure business continuity and minimize operational and financial risks. By establishing reliable recovery mechanisms and validating their effectiveness through rigorous testing, you will empower the organization to swiftly restore operations in the event of a disruption, thereby maintaining resilience and compliance with industry standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Backup Infrastructure Management: Design, deploy, and maintain comprehensive backup solutions for servers, databases, virtual machines, and cloud environments. Ensure these solutions are scalable, efficient, and aligned with the organization’s evolving technology landscape.
• Disaster Recovery Planning: Develop, document, and regularly update Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and runbooks in collaboration with business stakeholders. These plans must align with business continuity objectives and regulatory requirements to ensure readiness for any contingency.
• Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Proactively monitor daily backup operations to identify and resolve failures, ensuring backups complete successfully within defined time windows. Address any issues promptly to maintain data integrity and availability.
• RTO and RPO Management: Define, document, and maintain Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) in coordination with business units. These metrics are critical for measuring the effectiveness of recovery strategies and ensuring alignment with organizational priorities.
• DR Drills and Testing: Conduct regular DR drills and backup restoration tests to validate the recoverability of systems and data. These exercises are essential for identifying gaps in the DR strategy and ensuring the organization is prepared to respond to real-world incidents.
• Capacity and Retention Management: Oversee backup infrastructure capacity, retention policies, and storage optimization to balance performance, cost, and compliance requirements. Ensure that backup data is retained for the appropriate duration while maintaining accessibility and security.
• Compliance and Security: Ensure that backup and DR solutions comply with data security standards, encryption protocols, and regulatory mandates. Collaborate with security teams to implement best practices for protecting sensitive data throughout the backup and recovery lifecycle.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with infrastructure, security, and application teams to integrate backup and DR strategies with system architecture changes. This collaboration ensures that recovery capabilities evolve in tandem with the organization’s technological advancements.
• Incident Response Support: Lead or support recovery efforts during actual outages, data loss incidents, or disaster events. Your expertise will be instrumental in minimizing downtime and restoring critical systems to full operational status.
• Documentation and Reporting: Maintain accurate and up-to-date documentation of backup configurations, DR procedures, and test results. This documentation is vital for audit purposes, compliance reporting, and continuous improvement of recovery strategies.

Qualifications and Skills

To excel in this role, you will bring a blend of technical expertise, problem-solving skills, and a proactive approach to disaster preparedness. The ideal candidate will possess the following qualifications and competencies:

• Education: A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field is required. Advanced degrees or relevant certifications are a plus.
• Experience: A minimum of 3–6 years of hands-on experience in backup administration, disaster recovery, or IT infrastructure operations. Prior roles in similar environments are highly desirable.
• Technical Proficiency: In-depth experience with industry-leading backup solutions such as Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup, Veritas, or equivalent platforms. Familiarity with storage systems, virtualization technologies (VMware/Hyper-V), and cloud backup services (AWS, Azure, or GCP) is essential.
• Disaster Recovery Expertise: A strong understanding of disaster recovery planning, business continuity principles, and the ability to define and manage RTO and RPO metrics effectively.
• Technical Knowledge: Proficiency in replication technologies, DR orchestration tools, networking fundamentals, server management, and database backup requirements (e.g., SQL, Oracle).
• Certifications: Relevant certifications such as Veeam VMCE, ITIL, or vendor-specific backup certifications are preferred and will be considered a significant advantage.
• Communication Skills: Fluency in both Arabic and English, both written and spoken, is preferred. Strong communication skills are essential for collaborating with diverse teams and stakeholders across the organization.