Infrastructure Subject Matter Expert for BCDR and DR Automation

Role overview:

The infrastructure SME plays a critical role in ensuring that the underlying IT infrastructure fully supports business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) objectives, with a strong focus on DR automation. This role bridges infrastructure and automation teams, ensuring resilience, scalability, and seamless failover/failback execution across all infrastructure layers.

Key responsibilities

1. Infrastructure architecture & readiness

• Review and validate the end-to-end infrastructure architecture supporting automated DR failover and failback, including:
• Network, security, compute, storage, virtualization, containers, and data center components
• Ensure the design supports high availability, resiliency, and recoverability aligned with business requirements.

2. DR automation integration

• Act as the primary bridge between infrastructure teams and the DR automation team, ensuring alignment and seamless collaboration.
• Review and validate automated failover/failback workflows across infrastructure components, including:
• Network, security, servers, storage, DNS, virtualization platforms, and container environments
• Collaborate on the development of pre-failover validation scripts to ensure readiness before execution.

3. Recovery objectives & capacity planning

• Review and validate infrastructure-level RTOs, ensuring alignment with application and business recovery requirements.
• Ensure sufficient capacity and performance within DR sites and automation platforms to support:
• Full failover scenarios
• Partial or phased failover scenarios

4. Technical leadership & engagement

• Lead and actively participate in technical discussions and workshops across:
• Discovery
• Validation
• Tabletop exercises
• Provide domain expertise and recommendations to ensure robust infrastructure design and DR strategy alignment.

5. Performance & validation

• Oversee and validate infrastructure performance testing during and after DR failover/failback activities.
• Ensure that systems meet defined performance benchmarks and recovery objectives post-recovery.

6. Compliance & audit readiness

• Review and ensure adherence to audit and regulatory requirements, particularly around:
• Logging
• Monitoring
• Traceability of DR activities
• Support audit readiness by ensuring proper documentation and controls are in place.

7. Cross-functional collaboration

• Collaborate with application, network, security, database, and business teams to ensure end-to-end alignment.
• Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure dependencies are properly managed across infrastructure and application layers.

8. Continuous improvement & optimization

• Identify opportunities to optimize infrastructure resilience, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives based on test results, incidents, and evolving business needs.

Requirements

• Strong expertise in enterprise infrastructure design and operations (network, compute, storage, virtualization, cloud).
• Hands-on experience with disaster recovery architectures and DR automation tools.
• Deep understanding of failover/failback mechanisms and infrastructure dependencies.
• Experience in capacity planning, performance testing, and high availability design.
• Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements related to DR and infrastructure.
• Strong stakeholder communication and cross-team coordination skills.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in large-scale BCDR and DR automation programs.
• Certifications in infrastructure technologies, cloud platforms, or DR/BCDR frameworks.