Senior Disaster Recovery and Backup Engineer

Why you’ll love working here:

• high-performance, people-focused culture

• our commitment that equity, diversity, and inclusion are fundamental to our work environment and business success, which helps employees feel valued and empowered to be their authentic selves

• learning and development initiatives, including workshops, Speaker Series events and access to LinkedIn Learning, that support employees’ career growth

• membership in HOOPP’s world class defined benefit pension plan, which can serve as an important part of your retirement security

• competitive, 100% company-paid extended health and dental benefits for permanent employees, including coverage supporting our team's diversity and mental health (e.g., gender affirmation, fertility and drug treatment, psychological support benefits of $2,500 per year, and newly extended maternity/parental leave top of 26 weeks)

• optional post-retirement health and dental benefits subsidized at 50%

• yoga classes, meditation workshops, nutritional consultations, and wellness seminars

• access to an annual wellness reimbursement program for health and wellness-related expenses for permanent and temporary employees

• the opportunity to make a difference and help take care of those who care for us, by providing a financially secure retirement for Ontario healthcare workers

Job Summary

Our IT Corporate Solutions Group (CSG) is looking for an experienced individual who can fill a permanent, fulltime Disaster Recovery role. As a Senior Disaster Recovery and Backup Engineer you will play a pivotal role to support and enhance our backup, disaster recovery and cyber recovery strategies and operations. 

What you will do:

Backup, Disaster Recovery (DR), Cyber Recovery (CR):

• Fully understand HOOPP’s DR and BC plans and processes, collaborating with IT partners and stakeholders.

• Participate in delivering DR and BCP solutions with other IT groups, including Backup & Recovery planning, runbook readiness, testing, and incident readiness across all applications and systems.

• Partner with our Information Security team to enhance our Cyber Recovery strategy and operations.

• Implement and manage backup technologies including Air Gap, immutability, encryption, and clean room strategies.

• Play an active role in delivering backup and DR solutions, collaborating with application development, platform, and infrastructure teams.

• Assess, adapt, and evolve operational strategies for DR, BC, CR and application resilience.

• Partner with IT teams, educating peers and stakeholders on solutions and mitigating issues.

Agile Scrum Practices and Collaboration:

• Actively participates in Agile Scrum practices including daily standups, backlog refinement, planning, and sprint retrospectives.

• Creates a safe, supportive, and participatory environment that fosters ongoing mutual respect among team members.

Technical and Operational Support:

• Monitor daily backups and support backup infrastructure, applications, services, and network.

• Act as an SME for HOOPS primary DR and Backup platforms.

• Design and implement enterprise-level backup solutions integrated with Microsoft Azure and ensure optimal configuration and performance of the setup to meet recovery objectives.

• Optimize Cloud resources for cost-efficiency and performance.

• Ensure data protection and compliance with organizational policies and industry standards.

• Understand requirements and apply best practices to optimize systems and applications for performance, reliability, scalability, recoverability, resiliency, and supportability.

• Evaluate workflows, contribute to continuous improvement, identify inefficiencies, and propose optimization solutions for internal and external challenges.

• Lead initiatives independently to gather requirements, design, plan, and implement secure solutions aligned with the organization's technology strategy.

• Demonstrate expertise in designing, building, and maintaining complex, automated cloud-native solutions.

• Employ Terraform for infrastructure as code to automate configuration and deployment across Azure environments.

• Work closely with the Technical Lead and other team members to develop and maintain disaster recovery plans.

• Facilitate team training, contribute to wiki articles, participate in issue retrospectives, and engage in technical discussions.

• Ensure effective off-hours on-call response with minimal support volume.

• Learn technical infrastructure through operational support activities, creating contingency plans for infrastructure failures or service interruptions.

• Provide regular DR/BC reports on the effectiveness and completeness of the solutions.

Leadership and Partnership:

• Establish and maintain cross-departmental relationships to align activities with disaster recovery policies, project schedules, and inter-departmental dependencies.

• Innovate by evaluating, recommending, and implementing new concepts and technologies to enhance corporate DevOps practices and drive automation.

• Collaborate, communicate, and manage third-party vendors required for day-to-day duties.

• Collaborate to formulate and update solution standards and policies with internal teams and vendors.

• Collaborate with leadership, business, and departmental teams to support operations and deliver projects and services.

• Partner with the Product/Service Owner to help establish objectives and key results, maintaining focus on high-priority CSG and/or organizational priorities.

Our Technology Stack Our technology stack includes:

• Backups, Disaster Recovery, Cyber Recovery: Commvault, Veritas, KeepIT, AWS Backups, AWS Vaults, Microsoft ASR.

  • AirGap, immutability, encryption, cleanroom

• Cloud Platforms: Microsoft & AWS Cloud (IaaS).

• Cloud Networking: Azure Networking, AWS Networking, WAN

• On-Premises Infrastructure: Hyperconverged infrastructure for storage and compute.

• Infrastructure as Code: Ansible, Terraform.

• Scripting Languages: PowerShell, Python, ServiceNow, Power Platforms

• DevOps Pipelines: Comprehensive tools for continuous integration and delivery, Azure DevOps and GitHub

• Windows Server Middleware: SQL, IIS, etc.

• Supporting IT systems: Active Directory, EntraID, DNS, etc

• Operational Support Tools: Azure Monitor, Splunk, Azure Advisor, etc.

• Supporting Security tools

What you bring:

• Diploma or Degree in Computer Science or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

• 7+ years’ experience in Operations in progressively more senior roles.

• 5+ years’ experience in backups, disaster recovery operations.

• Enterprise Backup and DR technologies: design, enhancements, operations

• Cloud / DR certifications

• Proficiency and working knowledge of Windows Server OS environments, including configuration, security, performance tuning.

• Proficiency and working knowledge in multiple areas listed in our technology stack.

• Development and/or scripting experience in relevant DR Technologies (PowerShell, Terraform, Ansible, etc.).

• Possess strong technical writing and diagramming capabilities

• High standards of operational resilience

• Contribute effectively to the organization's technological objectives and business continuity efforts.

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, capable of taking end-to-end ownership.

• Innovative, motivated, and a quick thinker.

• Collaborative team player adept at building relationships.

• Ability to thrive under pressure and adapt to changing business needs.

• Passionate about driving growth and supporting business objectives through technical excellence.

• Certified in AWS and/or Azure Cloud, preferred