Senior Backup Engineer

Swiss Re is looking for a Senior Backup Engineer with focus on IT Resilience and Cyber Recovery Preparedness, collaborating closely with the functional lead providing the groupwide backup standards and drive its adoption. 

Your role 

In a guided federated backup environment, the Cyber Backup Engineer will be responsible for defining and ensuring the adaptation of robust backup strategies and capabilities for backup services for both on-premises and cloud-based systems and data. This role involves ensuring data availability, integrity, and recoverability by setting the requirements and optimizing backup solutions to align with industry best practices, organizational security policies and business requirements. Additionally, the engineer will collaborate closely with Operational Resilience and Cyber Disaster Recovery experts to develop comprehensive backup and recovery frameworks that address both Operational - and IT resilience requirements. This includes evaluating risks, recommending redundancy measures, and ensuring alignment of backup solutions with disaster recovery strategies to safeguard critical systems against potential disruptions. 

The Cyber Backup Engineer defines and adapts backup strategies for on-premises and cloud systems. Responsibilities include ensuring data availability, integrity, and recoverability by optimizing backup solutions according to industry best practices, security policies, and business needs. The engineer collaborates with Operational Resilience and Cyber Disaster Recovery experts to create comprehensive frameworks addressing operational and IT resilience. They assess risks, recommend redundancy measures, and align backup solutions with disaster recovery strategies to protect critical systems from disruptions. 
 
In this role you will: 

• Backup Implementation and Monitoring: Ensure backup completeness for all critical systems and data, both on-premises and cloud environments. Implement consolidated backup monitoring to identify failures and troubleshoot issues. 
• Backup Restoration and Validation: Set guidelines for periodic restoration tests to validate the integrity and effectiveness of backups. Capture proven Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). 
• Governance and Compliance Enforcement: Develop backup standards and best practices to ensure adherence to industry standards, security regulations, and compliance requirements. Establish auditing mechanisms for backup performance and data protection policies. 
• Disaster Recovery and Cyber Threats Preparedness: Enhance backup strategies to address disaster recovery scenarios, including ransomware attacks. Adopt immutable backup capabilities and air-gapped storage strategies to protect backup data. 
• Collaboration with Platform and Application Teams: Work with platform and application teams to address backup-related gaps. Implement backup solutions tailored to specific workloads and provide technical guidance on best practices and data retention policies. 
• Integration with Disaster Recovery Planning: Ensure backup capabilities are integrated into the organization's disaster recovery plans. Validate backup restore procedures and align them with disaster recovery strategies to minimize downtime and data loss. 

About the Team 

Sitting in the Group Technology Services division, the IT Resilience Team is a multinational team that aims to provide a one-stop shop, offering well-rounded IT Resilience services. 

We develop and maintain IT Resilience- and DR- capabilities to mitigate the risk of unavailability and restoring critical IT Services in the event of a major disruption and enabling a prioritized recovery with minimal impact to Swiss Re's critical business processes. Our team ensures that these measures are effectively embedded within the organization and considered modern best in class operating models and tech environments (Cloud, SaaS, DevSecOps, IaC). 

Your qualifications 

Nobody is perfect and meets 100% of our requirements. If you, however, meet some of the criteria below and are curious about the world of Disaster Recovery we'll be more than happy to meet you! 

Must Have 

• Solid understanding of the latest backup and recovery technologies, storage systems, virtualization and a general knowledge of IT operations. 

• Specific knowledge on resilience enhancing practices/solutions, such as immutable- and air gapped backups both on-premises as well as in the cloud. 

• The capacity to manage extensive amounts of technical data, integrate them into comprehensive datasets and to compile summarized output to an abstraction level enabling stakeholders to make well-informed decisions to improve IT resilience. 

• Strong English communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to connect with both technical and non-technical audiences. 

• Experience in developing and testing disaster recovery plans for backup solutions. 

• Experience tracking and evaluating third party vendors (for example Commvault) and the tools they deliver to support enterprise class backup and recovery environments. 

• A continuous improvement mind-set and dedication to uncovering better ways of working. 

• Self-driven and a "CAN DO" mentality and willingness to learn new technologies to continuously upskill. 

• Independent judgment and technical problem solving, decision-making applying sound commercial judgment 

Nice-to-have 

• A degree in a related field or relevant experience. 

• Demonstrated ability or qualifications in Disaster Recovery, emergency management, or related field. 

• Industry certifications as plus, like Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP), or Disaster Recovery Institute Certified Business Continuity Professional (DRI CBCP). 

• Passion about Agile principles and are excited to embed them into your daily work. 

• Have participated in the recovery efforts after a cyber event where data was destroyed. 

Interested in this new challenge? We are looking forward to your application!

For Slovakia the base salary range for this position is between [EUR 3,800] and [EUR 6,300] per month (for a full-time role). The specific salary offered considers:​

• the requirements, scope, complexity and responsibilities of the role, ​
• the applicant’s own profile including education/qualifications, expertise, specialisation, skills and experience.​

In addition to your base salary, Swiss Re offers an attractive performance-based variable compensation component, designed to recognise your achievements. Further you will enjoy a variety of global and location specific benefits.​

Eligibility may vary depending on the terms of Swiss Re policies and your employment contract.