The Backup and Recovery Specialist, Mid administers and optimizes enterprise backup and recovery services that safeguard large-scale data sets and business-critical applications in a federal IT environment. This role designs and refines backup policies, storage architectures, and recovery workflows to align with business continuity and disaster recovery objectives. The specialist performs advanced troubleshooting for failed jobs and complex restore scenarios across hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructures while providing technical guidance to junior staff and stakeholders on data protection standards and reporting.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect and maintain backup solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud workloads, including policy design, job scheduling, and capacity planning.
- Analyze backup infrastructure performance and tune concurrency, bandwidth usage, and storage tiers to meet stringent recovery time and recovery point targets.
- Perform complex restore operations such as database point-in-time recovery, granular file and application restores, and disaster recovery exercises.
- Implement and maintain backup encryption, key management, and role-based access controls to protect sensitive data in transit and at rest.
- Document and test disaster recovery runbooks, coordinating periodic failover and restoration drills with operations and application teams.
- Integrate backup systems with monitoring and reporting solutions to provide dashboards, alerts, and compliance metrics for leadership.
- Troubleshoot backup job failures and performance bottlenecks, driving root-cause analysis and remediation across the backup environment.
- Mentor junior backup and infrastructure staff, sharing best practices for data protection, recovery operations, and documentation.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant work experience.
- 4–7 years of experience in data backup and recovery, storage engineering, systems administration, or related IT infrastructure roles.
- Proficient understanding of backup and recovery principles and technologies, including support for physical, virtual, and cloud workloads.
- Hands-on experience with enterprise backup tools such as Veritas NetBackup, Veeam, CommVault, or similar platforms in medium to large environments.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with proven ability to resolve complex backup, storage, and recovery issues independently.
- Experience using monitoring tools and documenting backup configurations, runbooks, and recovery procedures.
- Active Secret clearance or ability to obtain and maintain the required investigation level.
- U.S. citizenship required.
Preferred Qualifications
- Relevant certifications such as Veritas Certified Specialist, Veeam Certified Engineer, or CISSP.
- Experience integrating backup and recovery platforms with enterprise monitoring, reporting, and compliance dashboards.
- Familiarity with highly regulated federal IT environments, including security and compliance controls for protected data.
- Background leading or coordinating disaster recovery exercises, tabletop scenarios, and recovery testing initiatives.