Technical Architect

Responsibilities

The Technical Architect is accountable for the design, development, and validation of end?to?end disaster recovery (DR) runbooks, establishing a consistent, technically credible recovery approach for each in?scope IT service. The role ensures alignment with DR standards, BIA?driven recovery requirements, and operational executability. Conduct detailed analysis of BIA outputs to understand service criticality, RTO/RPO, and recovery sequencing requirements.

• Work with stakeholders to understand application architecture, dependencies, and failure modes.
• Define “minimum viable recovery” states per service.
• Design technically sound DR recovery approaches, including severe failure scenarios where environments are fully lost.
• Develop, test, and refine service-specific DR runbooks, ensuring clear recovery sequencing, explicit decision points, and operational clarity.
• Lead structured walk?through and table?top testing of recovery runbooks.
• Provide formal handover to Application Support teams, ensuring clarity of ownership and ongoing maintenance.

• Strong understanding of Disaster Recovery (DR) concepts, patterns, and best practices.
• Experience designing end?to?end recovery approaches rather than partial or component-level recovery.
• Practical experience defining minimum viable recovery (MVR/MVI) states.
• Understanding of severe failure scenarios (e.g. full environment loss, data corruption).
• Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Interpretation ability to analyse and interpret BIA outputs.
• Translate business recovery requirements into technical recovery steps.
• Strong grasp of RTO/RPO principles and their technical implications.
• Ability to challenge unrealistic recovery objectives based on technical constraints.

• Proven experience creating operational runbooks from scratch.
• Strong technical writing skills, producing clear, structured, unambiguous instructions.
• Explicit pass/fail and go/no?go decision points.
• Ability to define standards, templates, and quality guides.
• Experience producing documentation suitable for operational execution under pressure.

• Deep understanding of application architectures (monolith, microservices, SaaS, COTS).
• Infrastructure components (compute, storage, network).
• Cloud and hybrid environments.
• Identify dependencies, sequencing, and failure points.
• Strong skills in dependency mapping and recovery order definition.

• Experience with cloud recovery patterns (backup/restore, rebuild, redeploy, rehydrate).
• Understanding of cloud native services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS recovery considerations).
• Identity, networking, and access dependencies during recovery.
• Ability to vet and validate cloud DR solutions for feasibility.

• Experience designing and leading table?top exercises and runbook walk?throughs.
• Strong ability to validate recovery logic and sequencing.
• Identify gaps, risks, and unrealistic steps.
• Comfort owning issue identification, refinement, and resolution tracking.

• Strong ability to work with Application Support SMEs, infrastructure and platform teams, Solution Architects, and business stakeholders.
• Skilled at eliciting undocumented system knowledge.
• Gaining operational buy?in for recovery approaches.

• Structured, methodical approach to problem analysis.
• Ability to design recovery under incomplete or imperfect information.
• Strong judgement to identify stop points, escalation triggers, risk acceptance scenarios.

• Comfortable working within DR standards and patterns (e.g. CIP?aligned frameworks).
• Quality gates and assurance criteria.
• Define “what good looks like” and assess compliance.
• Strong sense of accountability for technical correctness.

• Clear, confident communication of technical recovery designs.
• Explain complex recovery concepts in practical terms.
• Comfortable leading recovery discussions and testing sessions.
• Strong documentation and handover discipline.