Infrastructure Subject Matter Expert for BCDR & DR Automation - KSA

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:

o   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:

o   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:

o   Full failover scenarios

o   Partial or phased failover scenarios

4. Technical Leadership & Engagement

·        Lead and actively participate in technical discussions and workshops across:

o   Discovery

o   Validation

o   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:

o   Logging

o   Monitoring

o   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.