Demo

Site Reliability Engineer

Northern Trust
Chicago, IL Other
POSTED ON 10/17/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 6/18/2027

Project Overview / Contractor's Role:
Job Description: SRE/BackUp Engineer

Position Title:
SRE/BackUp Engineer
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.
________________________________________
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:
o Virtual environments
o Physical servers
o Databases
o Kubernetes/OpenShift
o Cloud-native workloads
o NAS/Object Storage
o 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.
________________________________________
Cyber Recovery Engineering
• Design and implement enterprise cyber recovery solutions including:
o Air-gapped recovery vaults
o Clean Rooms
o Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
o Immutable storage architectures
• Develop secure recovery workflows following cyberattack scenarios.
• Engineer automated malware scanning and recovery validation processes.
• Design and test recovery orchestration for severe-but-plausible cyber events.
• Support recovery point validation and promotion into production recovery environments.
• Collaborate with Cyber Security teams on ransomware resilience strategies.
________________________________________
Recovery Automation
• Develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Recovery as Code automation.
• Build automated recovery runbooks using tools such as:
o Ansible
o Terraform
o PowerShell
o Python
o GitHub Actions
• Automate recovery validation, reporting, and compliance evidence generation.
• Eliminate manual recovery processes wherever possible.
________________________________________
Observability & Monitoring
• Implement monitoring for:
o Backup success rates
o Replication health
o Recovery readiness
o Storage utilization
o Cyber vault health
o Infrastructure dependencies
• Build dashboards for executive and operational visibility.
• Integrate with enterprise observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus).
________________________________________
Cyber Resiliency Testing
• Plan and execute:
o Cyber recovery exercises
o Clean room validation
o Air-gap recovery testing
o Full isolated recovery environment exercises
o Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) testing
o Disaster Recovery testing
• Validate application recoverability against defined RTO/RPO objectives.
• Produce executive reporting on recovery readiness and testing outcomes.
________________________________________
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 Technologies
Experience with one or more:
• Cohesity
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
• Dell Data Domain
• Dell Cyber Recovery
• Rubrik
• Commvault
• Veritas NetBackup
• Veeam
________________________________________
Cyber Recovery
Experience designing and operating:
• Air-gapped vaults
• Immutable backups
• Clean Rooms
• Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
• Recovery orchestration
• Cyber resilience testing
• Ransomware recovery
• Recovery validation
________________________________________
Cloud Platforms
Experience with:
• Microsoft Azure
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform
Including:
• Cloud-native backup
• Cross-region recovery
• Hybrid cloud resiliency
________________________________________
Infrastructure
• VMware
• Hyper-V
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• Linux
• Windows Server
• Active Directory
• Enterprise storage platforms
________________________________________
Automation
Experience with:
• Ansible
• Terraform
• Python
• PowerShell
• Bash
• GitHub
• GitHub Actions
• CI/CD pipelines
________________________________________
Observability
Experience with:
• Dynatrace
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Splunk
• ELK Stack
• ServiceNow
________________________________________
Security
Knowledge of:
• Zero Trust architecture
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework
• CIS Controls
• Encryption and key management
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Secure recovery processes
________________________________________
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 the Federal Reserve, 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.
________________________________________
Leadership Competencies
• Strong systems thinking and engineering mindset.
• Excellent troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills.
• Ability to lead cross-functional technical recovery efforts.
• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.
• Proven ability to influence engineering standards and drive operational excellence.
• Commitment to continuous improvement through automation and reliability engineering.

Salary : $85 - $95

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