Corporate Vice President - Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Architect

Location

Hybrid - 3 days per quarter

New York Life is standing up a repeatable, automation-first Disaster Recovery (DR) operating model to ensure the company can sustain a Minimum Viable Company (MVC) and recover priority services within 48 hours. The DR Recovery Lead (IT Operations) is the single-threaded owner for day-to-day DR operations—driving orchestrated recovery execution, maintaining infrastructure and application runbooks, coordinating cross-technology teams and vendors, and ensuring audit-ready evidence for quarterly exercises and an annual recovery test calendar.

The role aligns DR capabilities with enterprise architecture and regulatory standards while continuously improving resiliency across the organization.

• Own disaster recovery operations and runbooks by building, maintaining, and continuously improving infrastructure and application recovery documentation, including integrations and upstream/downstream dependencies, aligned with the enterprise DR framework and RACI
• Execute automation-first, orchestrated recoveries using infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and evidence harnesses to capture artifacts, health checks, and outcomes for audit purposes
• Plan and lead quarterly tabletop and functional DR validations, manage an annual DR exercise calendar, and coordinate test execution, evidence collection, and acceptance with business owners
• Safeguard DR environments by monitoring configuration parity and drift, ensuring capacity and readiness across failover patterns, and coordinating change windows with APSO and CAB
• Coordinate secure restoration activities, including IAM, keys, certificates, and control re-enablement, in alignment with cyber incident response procedures
• Partner with DBA and data teams to ensure data recovery integrity through backup/restore or replication, validation, and reconciliation processes
• Define and execute service health verification using synthetic probes, SLIs, SLOs, and dashboards to validate recoverability
• Manage third-party vendors by coordinating SLAs, negotiating test windows, and validating contractual obligations and evidence
• Maintain and prioritize Critical Business Service (CBS) inventories and dependency mappings, scaling DR playbooks across priority services
• Serve as the DR operations lead during activations, coordinating communications and cross-technology execution through recovery

• Ensure architectural alignment by validating DR strategies, patterns, and runbooks against enterprise architecture standards, reference architectures, and future-state infrastructure plans; participate in design reviews and define DR non-functional requirements
• Engineer and operate DR solutions across on-premises and multi-cloud environments (e.g., AWS and Azure), leveraging cloud-native patterns such as active/active, regional failover, immutable infrastructure, and serverless recovery
• Embed regulatory and compliance controls by maintaining audit-ready evidence and traceability aligned with NYDFS, SOX, GDPR, NIST (e.g., SP 800-34 and 800-61), and ISO 22301 requirements
• Drive continuous improvement through quarterly DR improvement backlogs, piloting emerging techniques such as chaos engineering, game days, and AI-assisted recovery validation, while retiring manual processes and reporting ROI

• Enterprise Architecture and Value Stream architects
• Application owners and development teams
• IT Operations, Security, DBA/Data, and SRE/Observability teams
• APSO and Change Management
• Key vendors and third-party partners

• 8+ years of experience in IT Operations, SRE, Disaster Recovery, or equivalent enterprise resiliency roles
• Hands-on experience with DR patterns such as active/active and active/passive, backup and restore, replication, and hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure
• Strong automation and infrastructure-as-code expertise (e.g., Terraform, Cloud Formation), CI/CD pipelines, and scripting (Power Shell, Bash, or Python)
• Proven experience planning and executing DR tests, from tabletop exercises through functional validation, with rigorous evidence capture
• Familiarity with restoring security controls,…