Tech Lead - Disaster Recovery and Incident Management

Deriv; Cyberjaya; On-site; MYR 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Deriv is seeking a senior professional to own disaster recovery as an engineering discipline across our platform. You will design, schedule, and lead DR exercises for critical applications, coordinate incident response across engineering, infrastructure, SRE, Compliance, and Risk, and translate incidents into durable architectural improvements.

You will model failure scenarios with AI-assisted tools, surface patterns from past incidents, and automate runbooks to improve DR reporting during

Qualifications

• 7+ years in disaster recovery, incident management, or resilience roles.
• Experience running live P1/P2 incidents and directing cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Own disaster recovery as an engineering discipline for business-critical apps.
• Lead live incidents from declaration to resolution with cross-functional teams.
• Turn incidents into actionable architecture improvements and runbooks.

Skills

Disaster recovery

Incident management

Cloud platforms

ITIL framework

Effective communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IS or related field

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

When a database fails at 3am, or a SaaS provider we depend on goes dark, somebody has to already know what happens next. That's not a document sitting in a drive nobody's opened since the last audit. It's a tested, current, engineering-grade plan — and a person who can run the room when it matters.

Why This Matters

Trading for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime means our platform doesn't get to have a bad day. Millions of traders, real money, live markets, around the clock — an outage isn't an inconvenience, it's a trader who couldn't close a position. Regional outages, database failures, and SaaS disruptions aren't hypotheticals; they're a matter of when, not if.

Why Deriv

• We run live DR failover tests, not tabletop exercises that stay theoretical
• Our incident command spans engineering, infrastructure, SRE, Compliance, and Risk — in real time, not in a post-mortem doc three weeks later
• We're building toward AI-assisted failure modelling, incident signal correlation, and automated runbooks — not replacing judgment, but giving you better information faster when every minute matters

We share what we learn. Deriv is where we write about what we're building, what breaks, and what we figure out the hard way.

What You’ll Do

Own disaster recovery as an engineering discipline

• Design, schedule, and run DR exercises for business-critical applications — database failures, regional outages, SaaS provider disruptions, live failover tests
• Challenge business impact analyses directly with system and SaaS owners until RTO/RPO targets reflect actual business risk, not last year's assumptions
• Keep DR strategies, runbooks, and readiness dashboards matched to what's actually running in production — not what the architecture diagram from two years ago says

Command incidents when it counts

• Lead critical and major incidents from declaration to resolution, coordinating engineering, infrastructure, SRE, Compliance, and Risk in real time
• Make the fast calls under pressure: assess blast radius, set priority, pull in the right responders, and be the single source of truth while everyone else is asking "what's happening"
• Brief the right level of detail to the right audience — on-call engineers need different information than the C-suite, and giving everyone the same update either drowns engineers in noise or leaves leadership guessing

Turn incidents into architecture, not just tickets

• Lead post-incident reviews that find the systemic weakness, not just the symptom
• Hold teams accountable for closing findings from DR exercises, incidents, and audits — a finding that never closes is just a risk you've agreed to keep taking
• Challenge new systems before they reach production if they don't meet recovery requirements

Use AI as a working tool, not a buzzword

• Model failure scenarios and simulate downstream impact before they happen for real
• Correlate incident signals and surface patterns across past incidents instead of relying on institutional memory
• Automate runbooks and improve DR/incident reporting so the next 3am page has better information waiting for it

Who You Are

You've run live incidents, not just read about them

• 7+ years across disaster recovery, business continuity, incident management, infrastructure resilience, SRE, or similar. You've commanded a live P1 or P2 and know the difference between calm authority and just staying quiet.

You know cloud infrastructure well enough to ask the right question fast

• Practical knowledge of AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar — compute, storage, databases, networking, and where each of them actually breaks. You've run live DR failover tests, not just written the plan for one.

You think in frameworks but talk in outcomes

• Practitioner-level understanding of ITIL service management, business continuity, problem management, and service design — but you translate that into decisions people can act on, not slideware.

You communicate clearly when everyone else is panicking

• Strong written and verbal communication under pressure. You can brief a war room and an executive in the same hour without either one leaving confused.

You treat resilience posture as a fact, not a feeling

• You give leadership honest, data-backed visibility into where recovery capability actually stands against business risk — including when the answer isn't good.

You’re fluent with AI tools, not just aware of them

• Comfortable using AI for scenario modelling, incident triage support, pattern detection, and reporting — you know it accelerates the work, not that it replaces the judgment call.

You close the loop

• You hold teams accountable for fixing what DR exercises, post-incident reviews, and audits find — including when it's not your team's mess to clean up.

Bonus Points

• Direct experience interfacing with Compliance and Risk on regulatory classifications, audit readiness, and evidence management
• Experience building real-time DR readiness dashboards or leadership reporting on resilience posture
• Experience moving continuity processes from manual checklists toward automated or self-healing infrastructure

The Honest Reality

This is demanding work. You'll be the person paged when a database fails and the person expected to have already tested for it. You'll challenge system owners on assumptions they've held for years, and sometimes they won't like it. Post-incident reviews will surface things that make people uncomfortable, including decisions you made in the moment with incomplete information.

But you'll build the muscle that keeps a platform serving millions of traders standing when things go wrong — and you'll have the authority, in the moment that matters, to make the calls that matter. If you want DR to be a document nobody reads, this isn't it. If you want to own reliability as an engineering discipline, it might be.