Principal Cloud Architect, Disaster Recovery

The Disaster Recovery Architect will be responsible for managing and assisting efforts in facilitation, strategy, planning, analysis, and design related to the development of overall system disaster recovery and high availability architectures and implementations at Vistra. This leader will leverage intermediate level skills in influence, partnership, business and technology architecture and engineering to communicate and deliver on cross-functional technology needs that align to best practices, solution intents, and near-term goals and objectives

Key Accountabilities •Lead the development of DR roadmaps, standards, and reference architectures.•Provide expertise in the design, development, implementation, and testing of DR technology solutions.•Work with technology leaders to identify and validate system availability requirements and systems integrations and dependencies.•Review systems’ availability requirements, propose and develop solutions to consistently and efficiently recover systems and data in the event of a disaster or an outage based on the availability requirements provided.•Work with multiple technology teams to create design artifacts and documentation for engineers on how to implement the proposed solution.•Perform periodic and post change reviews of systems and their HA & DR capabilities to ensure SLAs can be met.•Conduct research and follow technology patterns to stay up to date on potential solutions to existing issues or to propose more efficient solutions.•Propose process changes, tooling and learning paths for the engineering & operations team to maintain and improve proficiency.•Lead and assist in tabletop DR exercises to ensure readiness and competency.•Lead and assist in the event of major outage.

Education, Experience & Skill Requirements •Experience gained through college degree programs and/or certification in IT, Infrastructure, Cloud or related field•12+ years IT experience in infrastructure, cloud, operations and site reliability engineering.•Experience in the Architecture and Design of highly-available distributed systems.•Experience in disaster recovery system design, DR testing, DR failover and recovery.•Understanding of networking concept.•Multi Cloud (AWS & Azure) and data center experience.•Understanding of software development lifecycle and DevOps practices such as Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, etc.•Hands on experience with scripting and programming languages. (Python, PowerShell, bash/shell, etc)•Diverse experience in technical configuration, technologies and processing environments.•Understanding of financial estimation and cost control.•Ability to make and tolerate decisions with imperfect or ambiguous information.•Creativity and innovation.

Key Metrics •Number of tabletop DR exercises led•Mission Critical DR artifacts•Improvements in RTO/RPO•Automation in DR•Standardization of DR designs and plans