Corporate Vice President - Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Architect

 

Location Designation: 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. As the DR Recovery Lead (IT Operations), you will be 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. You will align DR capabilities with enterprise architecture and regulatory standards while continuously improving resiliency across the organization.

 

What You’ll Do:

• 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

 

Added Focus Areas

• 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

 

Who You’ll Work With

• 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

 

What You’ll Bring:

• 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, CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, or Python)
• Proven experience planning and executing DR tests, from tabletop exercises through functional validation, with rigoro