SRE- Backup Engineer

Prairie Consulting Services; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 229,233,000 - 249,290,000; Full time

Job summary

Prairie Consulting Services in Chicago is 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,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in a relevant field.
• 7+ years in Backup/Infrastructure/SRE domains.
• 3+ years supporting cyber recovery architectures.
• Experience applying SRE in enterprise environments.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and high availability.

Responsibilities

• Engineer highly available enterprise platforms using SRE principles.
• Define SLOs/SLIs and error budgets for backup and recovery services.
• Develop automation to reduce toil and improve reliability.
• Conduct RCA and implement permanent fixes.
• Improve platform reliability, scalability and recoverability.
• Set up proactive monitoring and alerting for backup/cyber recovery.
• Participate in incident response and recovery activities.
• Design and administer backup/recovery across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS.
• Engineer immutable backup architectures for ransomware resilience.

Skills

SRE principles

Automation

Observability

Recovery orchestration

Security resiliency

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Cohesity

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Dell Data Domain

Dell Cyber Recovery

Rubrik

Commvault

Veritas NetBackup

Veeam

Dynatrace

Grafana

Prometheus

Splunk

ELK Stack

ServiceNow

Job description

Chicago IL, Tempe, AZ or Jersey City, NJ

Long Term Contract- 3 days hybrid

Pay- $80-$87/hr on W2

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.

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.
• 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 & Recovery: Cohesity, Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell Data Domain, Dell Cyber Recovery, Rubrik, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup, Veeam, enterprise backup architecture, immutable backups, air-gapped vaults, clean rooms, Isolated Recovery Environments (IREs), recovery orchestration, ransomware recovery, recovery validation, cyber resilience testing.

Automation & IaC: Ansible, Terraform, Python, PowerShell, Bash, GitHub, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Recovery as Code, automated recovery runbooks.

Observability & Operations: Dynatrace, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, ELK Stack, ServiceNow, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, incident response, root cause analysis, operational automation.

Security & Resiliency: Zero Trust, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, CIS Controls, encryption, key management, IAM, MFA, secure recovery processes, ransomware resilience, cyber recovery, disaster recovery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry.
• Knowledge of regulatory expectations from agencies such as Client, 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.

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.
• Design, implement, and administer enterprise backup and recovery solutions across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms.
• Engineer immutable backup architectures that support ransomware resilience.

• Physical servers
• Databases
• NAS/Object Storage

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:
• Air-gapped recovery vaults
• Clean Rooms
• Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
• 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:
• Ansible
• Terraform
• PowerShell
• Python
• GitHub Actions
• Automate recovery validation, reporting, and compliance evidence generation.
• Eliminate manual recovery processes wherever possible.

Observability & Monitoring

• Backup success rates
• Recovery readiness
• Build dashboards for executive and operational visibility.
• Integrate with enterprise observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus).

Cyber Resiliency Testing

• Plan and execute:
• Cyber recovery exercises
• Clean room validation
• Air-gap recovery testing
• Full isolated recovery environment exercises
• Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) testing

Disaster Recovery testing

• Validate application recoverability against defined RTO/RPO objectives.
• Produce executive reporting on recovery readiness and testing outcomes.