SRE- Backup Engineer

SRE/BackUp Engineer

Chicago IL, Tempe, AZ or Jersey City, NJ

Long Term Contract- 3 days hybrid

Pay- $80-$87/hr on W2

Direct Client Opportunity

We are seeking a highly technical Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with deep expertise in enterprise backup engineering, cyber recovery, and platform resiliency. This role will be responsible for engineering highly available, secure, and automated recovery capabilities that protect the organization against operational failures, ransomware, and other cyber threats.

The ideal candidate combines traditional SRE principles—automation, observability, reliability engineering, and resilience—with extensive experience designing and operating enterprise backup platforms, immutable storage, air-gapped cyber vaults, isolated recovery environments (IREs), and recovery orchestration. This individual will partner closely with Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Cloud Engineering, Application Development, and Disaster Recovery teams to ensure critical services remain recoverable, resilient, and continuously validated.

Required Qualifications

•Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience.

•7+ years in Backup Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering.

•5+ years designing enterprise backup solutions.

•3+ years supporting cyber recovery architectures.

•Experience implementing SRE principles within enterprise infrastructure environments.

•Strong understanding of distributed systems and high availability architectures.

Required Technical Skills

Backup & Recovery: Cohesity, Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell Data Domain, Dell Cyber Recovery, Rubrik, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam, enterprise backup architecture, immutable backups, air-gapped vaults, clean rooms, Isolated Recovery Environments (IREs), recovery orchestration, ransomware recovery, recovery validation, cyber resilience testing.

Cloud & Infrastructure: Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, cloud-native backup, cross-region recovery, hybrid cloud resiliency, VMware, Hyper-V, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Linux, Windows Server, Active Directory, enterprise storage platforms.

Automation & IaC: Ansible, Terraform, Python, PowerShell, Bash, GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Recovery as Code, automated recovery runbooks.

Observability & Operations: Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK Stack, ServiceNow, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, incident response, root cause analysis, operational automation.

Security & Resiliency: Zero Trust, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Controls, encryption, key management, IAM, MFA, secure recovery processes, ransomware resilience, cyber recovery, disaster recovery.

Preferred Qualifications

•Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry.

•Experience supporting GSIB cyber resiliency programs.

•Knowledge of regulatory expectations from agencies such as Client, OCC, or FFIEC.

•Experience with chaos engineering and resilience testing.

•Familiarity with SRE tooling and reliability metrics.

•Experience implementing AI-assisted operations (AIOps) and predictive analytics.

Key Responsibilities

Site Reliability Engineering

•Engineer and maintain highly available, resilient enterprise platforms using SRE principles.

•Define and measure Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets for backup and recovery services.

•Develop automation to reduce operational toil and improve reliability.

•Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement permanent corrective actions.

•Continuously improve platform reliability, scalability, performance, and recoverability.

•Establish proactive monitoring, alerting, and observability for backup and cyber recovery platforms.

•Participate in incident response and major incident recovery activities.

Backup Engineering

•Design, implement, and administer enterprise backup and recovery solutions across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms.

•Engineer immutable backup architectures that support ransomware resilience.

•Design backup strategies for:

Virtual environments

Physical servers

Databases

Kubernetes/OpenShift

Cloud-native workloads

NAS/Object Storage

Enterprise applications

•Optimize backup performance, retention, replication, encryption, and recovery objectives.

•Implement policy-based backup automation and lifecycle management.

•Ensure compliance with enterprise RPO and RTO requirements.