SRE/Backup Engineer

Spectraforce Technologies; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Spectraforce Technologies in Chicago, IL seeks a Senior SRE/Backup Engineer to design and operate enterprise backup platforms, immutable storage, and air-gapped cyber vaults. You will lead recovery orchestration, automate recovery workflows, and partner with Cyber Security and Cloud teams to validate recoverability across on-prem and cloud environments.

The role emphasizes SRE principles, incident response, and resilience testing to ensure critical services remain recoverable during cyber

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/IT/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years in Backup Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering.
• 5+ years designing enterprise backup solutions.
• 3+ years supporting cyber recovery architectures.
• Experience implementing SRE principles within enterprise infrastructure environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and high availability architectures.

Responsibilities

• Engineer highly available, resilient enterprise platforms using SRE principles.
• Define and measure SLOs/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.

Skills

SRE principles

Automation

Observability

Reliability engineering

Cyber recovery

Immutable storage

Air-gapped vaults

Recovery orchestration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

Cohesity

PowerProtect Data Manager

Data Domain

Cyber Recovery

Rubrik

Commvault

Veritas NetBackup

Veeam

VMware

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Linux

Windows Server

Active Directory

Job description

Role: SRE/Backup Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL

Duration: 9+ Months

Project Overview / Contractor's Role:

SRE/BackUp Engineer

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.

Experience Level: 3 - Senior

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.
• 5+ years designing enterprise backup solutions.
• 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 Technologies

• Cohesity
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
• Dell Data Domain
• Dell Cyber Recovery
• Rubrik
• Commvault
• Veritas NetBackup
• Veeam

Cyber Recovery

• Air-gapped vaults
• Immutable backups
• Clean Rooms
• Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
• Recovery orchestration
• Cyber resilience testing
• Ransomware recovery
• Recovery validation

Cloud Platforms

• Microsoft Azure
• AWS
• Google Cloud Platform

Including:

• Cloud-native backup
• Cross-region recovery
• Hybrid cloud resiliency

Infrastructure

• VMware
• Hyper-V
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• Linux
• Windows Server
• Active Directory
• Enterprise storage platforms

Automation

• Ansible
• Terraform
• Python
• PowerShell
• Bash
• GitHub
• GitHub Actions
• CI/CD pipelines

Observability

• Dynatrace
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Splunk
• ELK Stack
• ServiceNow

Security

• Zero Trust architecture
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework
• CIS Controls
• Encryption and key management
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Secure recovery processes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience supporting GSIB cyber resiliency programs.
• Knowledge of regulatory expectations from agencies such as the Federal Reserve, 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.

Leadership Competencies

• Strong systems thinking and engineering mindset.
• Excellent troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills.
• Ability to lead cross-functional technical recovery efforts.
• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.
• Proven ability to influence engineering standards and drive operational excellence.
• Commitment to continuous improvement through automation and reliability engineering.

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.

Backup Engineering

• Design, implement, and administer enterprise backup and recovery solutions across on‑premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms.
• Engineer immutable backup architectures that support ransomware resilience.
• Design backup strategies for:
  • o Virtual environments
  • o Physical servers
  • o Databases
  • o Kubernetes/OpenShift
  • o Cloud‑native workloads
  • o NAS/Object Storage
  • o 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:
  • o Air‑gapped recovery vaults
  • o Clean Rooms
  • o Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
  • o Immutable storage architectures
• 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:
  • o Ansible
  • o Terraform
  • o PowerShell
  • o Python
  • o GitHub Actions
• Automate recovery validation, reporting, and compliance evidence generation.
• Eliminate manual recovery processes wherever possible.

Observability & Monitoring

• Implement monitoring for:
  • o Backup success rates
  • o Replication health
  • o Recovery readiness
  • o Storage utilization
  • o Cyber vault health
  • o Infrastructure dependencies
• Build dashboards for executive and operational visibility.
• Integrate with enterprise observability platforms (e.g., Dynatrace, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus).

Cyber Resiliency Testing

• Plan and execute:
  • o Cyber recovery exercises
  • o Clean room validation
  • o Air‑gap recovery testing
  • o Full isolated recovery environment exercises
  • o Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) testing
  • o Disaster Recovery testing
• Validate application recoverability against defined RTO/RPO objectives.
• Produce executive reporting on recovery readiness and testing outcomes.