Disaster Recovery​/Business Continuity Architect

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, validation, and operational readiness of disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities for the production estate during the migration to the new colocation environment.
• Own the review, validation, and formal sign-off of the production rollback strategy for the tightly coupled monolithic application estate.
• Develop and maintain detailed, step‑step rollback runbooks covering planned and emergency recovery scenarios.
• Coordinate rollback rehearsals with infrastructure, application, database, and operations teams to validate execution times and dependencies.
• Identify rollback risks, decision points, and business impacts, ensuring clear go/no‑go criteria are established for production releases.
• Design and execute comprehensive disaster recovery exercises covering infrastructure, applications, databases, and supporting services.
• Validate backup integrity, restoration procedures, and end‑to‑end recovery processes within the new colocation environment.
• Ensure disaster recovery testing satisfies internal governance, audit requirements, and financial services regulatory expectations.
• Produce evidence packs, test reports, lessons learned, and remediation plans following each exercise.
• Review and enhance Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) for critical production services.
• Ensure business continuity processes align with operational resilience objectives and business impact assessments.
• Work with business stakeholders to validate continuity arrangements for critical services and operational teams.
• Support crisis management planning and major incident response exercises.
• Assess resilience risks across hybrid environments spanning remaining on‑premises infrastructure and the new colocation platform.
• Validate resilience of shared services, including identity, networking, storage, monitoring, messaging, and database platforms.
• Ensure inter‑site dependencies are understood, documented, and appropriately mitigated.
• Monitor and manage risks associated with transitional operating models during migration.
• Define, validate, and monitor Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) for all in‑scope services.
• Confirm infrastructure and application architectures are capable of meeting agreed recovery objectives.
• Identify gaps between current capabilities and business recovery requirements and drive remediation activities.
• Work closely with solution architects and engineering teams to optimise recovery capabilities.
• Ensure disaster recovery and business continuity documentation meets organisational governance standards.
• Support internal audit, risk management, and regulatory assurance activities.
• Maintain risk registers relating to resilience, recovery capability, and migration readiness.
• Provide formal readiness assessments and recommendations to programme governance boards prior to production cutovers.

• Proven experience designing and implementing Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity solutions within enterprise environments.
• Experience supporting large‑scale infrastructure or data centre migration programmes.
• Strong understanding of high‑availability architectures, replication technologies, backup platforms, and failover mechanisms.
• Experience defining and validating RTOs and RPOs for mission‑critical services.
• Knowledge of financial services operational resilience and disaster recovery expectations.
• Familiarity with hybrid infrastructure environments spanning on‑premises, colocation, and cloud platforms.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with experience working across infrastructure, application, security, operations, and business teams.
• Excellent documentation, governance, and risk management capabilities.