Lead Storage & Data Protection Engineer

Lead Storage & Data Protection Engineer

At HDR, our employee-owners are fully engaged in creating a welcoming environment where each of us is valued and respected, a place where everyone is empowered to bring their authentic selves and novel ideas to work every day. As we foster a culture of inclusion throughout our company and within our communities, we constantly ask ourselves: What is our impact on the world? Define and own the technical roadmap for storage services, backup/recovery capabilities, and disaster recovery processes across the VCF platform. Establish enterprise standards for vSAN storage policies, service tiers, workload placement, capacity governance, and performance baselines. Lead strategy for VCF-native data protection adoption, recovery service design, and transition from legacy backup platforms. Define backup and recovery operating models across VCF, traditional storage platforms, and public cloud services. Own disaster recovery process design, testing cadence, recovery success criteria, and continuous improvement plans. Serve as the senior technical escalation point for complex storage, backup, recovery, and cross-platform resiliency issues. Lead architecture-aligned decisions involving adjacent VCF platform tools and dependencies that affect recoverability, including management, networking, observability, and cloud extension capabilities. Partner with infrastructure leadership, architects, cloud teams, security teams, and service management to align storage and recovery strategy with business resiliency goals. Review and approve high-risk technical changes impacting storage availability, backup integrity, or recovery readiness. Mentor senior engineers, shape technical development across the job family, and build durable engineering capability. This on-site role supports 24/7 operations through real-time collaboration, standard shifts occur within a 6:00 AM - 6:00 PM window, Monday through Friday. Additionally, this position requires scheduled on-call flexibility and the ability to remain reasonably reachable during off-hours for critical business continuity.

Preferred Qualifications: Advanced VMware certifications relevant to vSAN, VCF, or data protection. Deep experience with VMware Live Recovery and enterprise DR design. Strong experience with Commvault, Veeam, or other enterprise backup transformation programs. Broad knowledge of VCF platform tools and services beyond storage, including SDDC Manager, NSX, VCF Operations, logging/observability services, HCX, DSM, Kubernetes-adjacent platform services, and hybrid cloud integration points. Experience with cloud-based backup, archive, and cross-environment recovery strategies. Strong automation and scripting experience supporting storage lifecycle, backup governance, and recovery validation.

Required Qualifications: Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; or equivalent practical experience. Minimum 8 years of experience in enterprise storage, backup/recovery, disaster recovery, virtualization, or infrastructure engineering. Expert-level experience with VMware vSAN, storage architecture, capacity planning, and performance engineering. Expert-level experience with backup and recovery strategies, DR planning, restore validation, and resilience program execution. Proven experience leading storage or data protection standards in large-scale enterprise environments. Strong experience driving technical direction across multiple infrastructure domains. Demonstrated ability to lead major incidents, recovery events, and strategic transformation initiatives.