Project Manager - IT Disaster Recovery

Position Overview



Sr. Project Manager to support and mature an established enterprise Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity program .
This person will work as the IT arm of the Business Continuity Manager , coordinating complex DR activities across infrastructure, applications, databases, virtualization, networking, operations, security, architecture, and business teams.
The ideal candidate is an experienced IT Infrastructure/DR Project Manager who has personally managed disaster recovery testing, including failover and failback exercises , and understands infrastructure well enough to challenge technical teams, identify risks, and drive issues to resolution.



Key Responsibilities

• Plan, coordinate, and execute enterprise disaster recovery failover/failback testing .
• Develop and maintain the master DR testing schedule and resource plans.
• Coordinate application, server, database, network, virtualization, security, and operations teams during DR exercises.
• Track application recovery requirements, certifications, priorities, dependencies, and readiness.
• Maintain and improve DR recovery playbooks, procedures, checklists, and documentation.
• Develop repeatable DR governance processes, standards, controls, and reporting.
• Track risks, issues, dependencies, action items, and remediation activities.
• Coordinate lessons learned and drive improvements following DR exercises.
• Develop executive-level dashboards, metrics, status reports, and program communications.
• Challenge technical teams and identify gaps in recovery plans, dependencies, timelines, and recovery objectives.
• Coordinate with application owners and infrastructure teams to ensure successful recovery and return-to-production activities.
• Support automation initiatives designed to improve DR testing and recovery readiness.
• Partner with the Business Continuity Manager, PMO, IT leadership, and business stakeholders.
• Ensure program activities follow established IT governance and project management methodologies.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of IT project/program management experience.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience managing disaster recovery testing.
• Direct experience coordinating failover and failback exercises.
• Strong understanding of IT infrastructure, including servers, databases, virtualization, networking, storage, cloud, operations, and security .
• Experience coordinating large, cross-functional technical teams.
• Experience developing DR/BC governance, standards, checklists, processes, and controls.
• Strong executive-level reporting, dashboards, metrics, and presentation skills.
• Strong Excel skills.
• Proven ability to manage risks, issues, dependencies, resources, and competing priorities.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, stakeholder management, and organizational skills.
• Experience working in enterprise environments with formal change, incident, and governance processes.
• Ability to work after hours occasionally.

Preferred

• PMP certification.
• Experience with SOX or other regulated environments.
• Experience with SharePoint, Azure DevOps/TFS, MS Project, and Visio.
• Experience supporting infrastructure modernization or cloud environments.
• Experience improving or maturing an existing enterprise DR/BC program.
• Agile and Waterfall project management experience.

Critical Requirement



Candidates must have actual experience managing DR testing/failover/failback exercises. General project management experience or DR documentation experience alone is not sufficient.