Director, Architect Enterprise Resilience & Recoverability

POSITION SUMMARY: 

We are seeking a Director, Architect of Enterprise Resiliency & Recoverability to serve as the principal technical leader for how Marriott engineers, validates, and matures resiliency and disaster recovery across its global technology landscape. Reporting to the Senior Director of Enterprise Observability and Technology Resiliency & Recoverability, this role is the senior technical authority for both preventative resiliency and operational recoverability, ensuring that the systems our guests and properties depend on are resilient by design and recoverable by proof. 

The Director owns the architectural and engineering discipline that keeps Marriott’s most critical platforms resilient and recoverable at scale. The role spans the full spectrum of modern resiliency practice - repeatable failover with verified transaction success, component-level recovery, automated DR validation, multi-region and active-active patterns, chaos engineering, and self-healing service design. The Director partners deeply with Enterprise Architecture, SRE, Infrastructure, Cloud, Network, Security, and Application Engineering teams to embed resiliency into how Marriott designs, deploys, and operates technology.  

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for a technical architect who can set direction, drive cross-domain remediation, and stand up as the technical authority during recovery exercises and live recovery events - not a people manager of engineers. The right candidate is fluent in cloud-native resiliency patterns, multi-region architectures, chaos engineering, and modern recovery automation, and is equally comfortable in an architecture review, an executive readout, and a live recovery event.  

This role is ideal for someone who:  

• Translates deep technical knowledge of resiliency and recovery into architectural standards and business-aligned decisions 

• Navigates ambiguity, matrixed organizations, and limited resources with clarity and conviction 

• Leads through influence - setting standards, coaching engineers, and guiding remediation across teams without direct authority 

• Balances strategic oversight with sleeves-rolled-up engineering, including direct contribution to recovery design, automation, and validation 

• Thinks in systems: connects business transactions to SLOs, SLOs to architecture, and architecture to recovery outcomes 

• Is energized by building engineered, continuously validated resilience at enterprise scale 

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Required Experience and Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline - or equivalent professional experience and certifications 

• 8+ years of progressive experience in systems, infrastructure, cloud, or platform engineering within a large enterprise environment, including:  

• 5+ years specifically in resiliency engineering, disaster recovery, or reliability engineering at scale 

• Demonstrated experience as a senior technical authority - architect, principal engineer, or technical director - for enterprise resiliency and/or disaster recovery programs and for live recovery events  

• Proven experience designing and validating end-to-end DR and high-availability architectures for enterprise-scale workloads across cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, or Alibaba), hybrid, and on-premises environments 

• Experience aligning technical recovery designs to business recovery objectives (RTO, RPO, business criticality) and translating between business impact and technical implementation 

• Deep working knowledge of cloud-native resiliency patterns: multi-AZ and multi-region designs, redundancy and fault tolerance, automated failover, dynamic traffic management, and adaptive connectivity 

• Strong recoverability foundation: backup and restore integrity, immutable and versioned backup, ransomware recovery frameworks, isolated recovery environments, and cross-region recovery patterns 

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation tooling (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) applied to DR orchestration, validation, and drift detection 

• Experience with containerized and distributed systems, including Kubernetes, service mesh, and platform-level resiliency patterns 

• Demonstrated ability to influence and drive accountability across a highly matrixed organization without direct authority - across application, infrastructure, cloud, network, SRE, security, and vendor teams 

• Excellent written, verbal, and executive communication skills; able to translate resiliency posture, risks, and tradeoffs for technical stakeholders, executives, and auditors alike 

Preferred:

• Graduate Degree in a technical discipline 

• Experience operating in a global, multi-region enterprise environment with hybrid, cloud, and on-premises platforms and a complex partner/vendor ecosystem 

• Direct experience standing up or maturing chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day programs in production environments 

• Experience with active-active architectures and zero-failover design patterns for mission-critical revenue paths 

• Familiarity with advanced observability - health modeling, distributed tracing, SLI/SLO design - and tooling such as Dynatrace, Splunk, Cribl, or ThousandEyes 

• Experience partnering with security teams on ransomware protection, isolated recovery environments, and recovery validation 

• Familiarity with industry frameworks and standards for resiliency, recoverability, and operational resilience (NIST, ISO 22301, ISO 27031, BCM Institute ORMM, Veeam/McKinsey DRMM) 

• Relevant certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Google Cloud Professional Architect, CBCP, DRII, ISO 22301 Lead Implementer, or CISSP 

• Experience in hospitality, travel, retail, or other industries with distributed property/store technology footprints and 24x7 guest- or customer-facing transactions 

• Prior experience leading or contributing to a technology consolidation or modernization program of significant scale 

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES

• Accountable for the technical strategy, architecture, and engineering execution of resiliency and recoverability across Marriott’s global technology estate - spanning AWS, Azure, Alibaba, hybrid cloud, on-premises, and partner-hosted workloads supporting hundreds of properties worldwide. 

• Own the architectural roadmap for engineered, continuously tested resilience across the most critical revenue-supporting platforms 

• Serve as the single technical leader unifying resiliency (preventative, design-time) and recoverability (operational, response-time) under a single coherent strategy 

• Partner with major modernization and consolidation programs to ensure new and migrating platforms are recoverable by design, with repeatable failover and verified transaction success for prioritized critical workloads 

• Establish and chair architectural standards, production readiness criteria, and resiliency review gates that govern how new and changed systems enter production 

• Breaks down complex technical problems and drives to the best technical decision based on high level of communication, debate, discussion within the team and with other subject matter experts 

• Performs research in technologies that are emerging in the industry as a competitive advantage and reports on that research in terms of business opportunities 

• Advises on viability of emerging technologies for the business; articulates the risks, costs, and ROI 

• Provides guidance to improve operational processes and procedures to improve service, reduce costs, and leverage technologies 

• Lead and develop a small team of senior engineers focused on resiliency and recoverability, while operating as a force multiplier across the broader engineering organization 

ADDITIONAL EXPECTATIONS 

• Marriott Global Technology operates in a hybrid work model, balancing in-office collaboration with remote work based on business and operational needs. This role may be based in Bethesda, Maryland or performed remotely, provided the associate can effectively operate in a highly matrixed, global enterprise environment. 

• Due to the nature of resiliency and recoverability activities, this role is expected to support recovery exercises and live recovery events, which may require availability outside of standard business hours. The role may also require periodic travel, generally up to quarterly, to support recovery exercises, planning sessions, key operational activities, or partner sites. 

• Associates in this role must be comfortable operating independently with minimal oversight, influencing senior technical and executive stakeholders, and providing decisive technical guidance during high-impact recovery scenarios. 

Managing Projects and Priorities

• Develops specific goals and plans to prioritize, organize, and accomplish work for self and direct reports. 

• Understands and meets the needs of key stakeholders. 

• Provides direction and assistance to other teams regarding projects. Determines priorities, schedules, plans and necessary resources to ensure completion of any projects on schedule. 

• Provides recommendations to improve the effectiveness of processes or programs. 

Managing and Conducting Human Resources Activities

• Helps interview and hire employees. 

• Sets goals and expectations for direct reports and holds staff accountable for performance goals. 

• Solicits employee feedback. 

• Fosters employee commitment and engagement and models desired service behaviors in all interactions with customer and associates  

• Conducts annual performance appraisal with direct reports according to Standard Operating Procedures. 

• Champions change ensures brand and regional business initiatives are implemented and communicates follow-up actions to team as necessary. 

• Identifies talents of direct reports and their teams and assists with their growth and development plans  

• Performance other reasonable duties as assigned  

At Marriott International, we are dedicated to being an equal opportunity employer, welcoming all and providing access to opportunity. We actively foster an environment where the unique backgrounds of our associates are valued and celebrated. Our greatest strength lies in the rich blend of culture, talent, and experiences of our associates.  We are committed to non-discrimination on any protected basis, including disability, veteran status, or other basis protected by applicable law. 

All positions offer a 401(k) plan, stock purchase plan, discounts at Marriott properties, commuter benefits, employee assistance plan, and childcare discounts.  Benefits are subject to terms and conditions, which may include rules regarding eligibility, enrollment, waiting period, contribution, benefit limits, election changes, benefit exclusions, and others. Click here to learn more.

Full-time positions also offer coverage for medical, dental, vision, health care flexible spending account, dependent care flexible spending account, life insurance, disability insurance, accident insurance, adoption expense reimbursements, paid parental leave and educational assistance. 

Washington Applicants Only : Employees will accrue paid sick leave, 0.077 PTO balance for every hour worked and be eligible to receive a minimum of 9 holidays annually.

Marriott HQ is committed to a hybrid work environment that enables associates to Be connected.  Headquarters-based positions are considered hybrid, for candidates within a commuting distance to Bethesda, MD; candidates outside of commuting distance to Bethesda, MD will be considered for Remote positions.

Marriott International is the world’s largest hotel company, with more brands, more hotels and more opportunities for associates to grow and succeed. Be where you can do your best work,​ begin your purpose,  belong to an amazing global​ team, and  become the best version of you.