Director, Technology Resilience & Recovery

Sun Life•Waterloo, ON

1d•CA$110,000 - CA$180,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This role is responsible for providing independent challenge of technology resilience across various environments including infrastructure, applications, data, and cloud/hybrid systems. The position assesses the alignment between business impact tolerances, recovery objectives (RTO/RPO), disaster recovery design, recovery architecture, and demonstrated recovery capabilities. Key responsibilities include identifying systemic technology resilience risks, challenging the design and completeness of technology recovery testing, and validating evidence supporting recoverability claims. The role also involves establishing and monitoring technology resilience Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and measures, preparing insights for senior governance forums, and supporting regulatory and audit reporting. Additionally, the Director will partner with various technology and risk teams to promote integrated resilience outcomes and advise on major technology changes that could affect resilience or recoverability.

Requirements

University degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
Typically 10+ years of experience in technology risk, disaster recovery, technology resilience, infrastructure/application recovery, operational resilience, cyber resilience, or related disciplines.
Strong technical expertise in application recovery, infrastructure resilience, DR architecture, cloud/hybrid recovery, production-like testing, data resilience, and cyber recovery topics.
Strong understanding of operational resilience, BCM/DR lifecycle, OSFI E-21, OSFI B-13, risk appetite, KRIs, issue management, and 2LOD challenge practices.
Ability to review technical evidence and translate findings into business risk, remediation actions, and governance decisions.
Excellent stakeholder management, written communication, presentation, and constructive challenge skills.

Nice To Haves

Professional certifications such as CBCP/MBCI, CRISC, CISM, CISSP, ITIL, PMP, AWS/Azure architecture/resilience, or equivalent are assets.

Responsibilities

Provide independent challenge of technology resilience across infrastructure, applications, data, cloud/hybrid environments, and critical service dependencies.
Assess alignment between business impact tolerances, RTO/RPO expectations, DR design, recovery architecture, and demonstrated recovery capability.
Identify systemic technology resilience risks across Business Groups and Corporate Functions, including architecture vulnerabilities, single points of failure, recoverability gaps, and untested dependencies.
Challenge the design, realism, and completeness of technology recovery testing, including end-to-end testing, failover/failback, production-like load testing, and manual recovery under platform outage conditions.
Validate evidence supporting recoverability claims, including test results, recovery runbooks, backup/restoration evidence, application dependency mapping, and remediation closure artifacts.
Document challenge outcomes and require formal issue capture where capability gaps, unsupported assumptions, or recovery weaknesses are identified.
Establish and monitor technology resilience KRIs, RAS measures, thresholds, escalation triggers, and trend analysis in partnership with the AVP and ORCT leadership.
Prepare insights for senior governance forums on technology resilience posture, systemic issues, remediation progress, and accountable risk decisions.
Support regulatory, audit, and management reporting by linking technical recovery evidence to business criticality and operational resilience outcomes.
Partner with DBTS, Cyber, Enterprise Architecture, Operational Resilience, BCM, Crisis Management, TPRM, and Business Group Risk teams to promote integrated resilience outcomes.
Advise on major technology change, cloud transformation, outsourcing, and architecture decisions where resilience or recoverability could be affected.
Provide technical coaching and quality review to managers and SMEs performing domain-specific DR and backup/data resilience challenge.