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.