Principal Disaster Recovery Architect

Generac•Waukesha, WI

About The Position

We are Generac, a leading energy technology company committed to powering a smarter world. Over the 60 plus years of Generac’s history, we’ve been dedicated to energy innovation. From creating the home standby generator market category, to our current evolution into an energy technology solutions company, we continue to push new boundaries. The Principal Disaster Recovery Architect is accountable for the design, governance, and continuous improvement of enterprise backup and disaster recovery capabilities. This role converts Business Impact Assessment outcomes into recovery strategy and defines architecture and processes that raise reliability at scale. The Architect partners with Business Continuity leaders, platform and application owners, infrastructure and cloud teams, and risk and compliance to deliver resilient services that meet business recovery objectives. This role ensures the organization can effectively respond to and recover from disruptive events while maintaining critical operations and services.

Requirements

Bachelor degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. Equivalent experience considered.
Ten or more years in enterprise technology with deep experience in disaster recovery, business continuity, or service resilience.
Risk, Compliance, and Governance Align contingency planning and configuration controls to relevant standards and frameworks including NIST, CIS Controls, and ITIL. Translate control requirements into policies, technical standards, and automated checks. Partner with Internal Audit, Enterprise Risk, and Compliance to plan assessments, collect evidence, and close findings. Maintain an authoritative control narrative for disaster recovery and configuration management. Provide regular reporting to technology and business leadership on recovery readiness, configuration data health, control effectiveness, and program maturity.
Leadership and Collaboration Mentor architects and engineers and provide guidance to application teams to embed resilient design and accurate configuration practices. Lead cross functional exercises and workshops to validate dependencies, recovery steps, and runbook accuracy. Manage vendor relationships for disaster recovery platforms and services. Influence product roadmaps through structured feedback.

Nice To Haves

One or more of the following is strongly preferred: Certified Business Continuity Professional, ISO 22301 Lead Implementer, ITIL 4 Foundation or higher, AWS Solutions Architect or Azure Solutions Architect, CISSP or CISM.

Responsibilities

Develop an enterprise disaster recovery strategy that is directly aligned to Business Impact Assessment outcomes including clear Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives and restoration priorities by business service.
Standardize resiliency processes and capabilities across the global enterprise including plan templates, test methods, communications, and reporting. Drive for subsidiary and international business unit integration and governance.
Create and maintain a strategic roadmap that increases trust in disaster recovery capabilities with milestones, maturity targets, service level objectives, and measurable risk reduction.
Drive alignment of the disaster recovery program with the greater enterprise Business Continuity plan including roles and responsibilities, escalation paths, and joint exercises.
Define and own the information system contingency planning life cycle including plan development, training, testing and exercises, and plan maintenance.
Establish architecture standards for recovery solutions such as backup and restore, active-active, active-standby, regional failover, alternate processing sites, and data protection across on-premises and cloud.
Ensure resilient design is integrated into system development life cycle gates, change control, and release planning.
Set enterprise policies for backup frequency, retention, encryption, and separation of duties and verify execution through controls and continuous monitoring.
Lead regular recovery testing for tier one and tier two services including technical failover, data recovery, application restoration, and end to end business validation.
Maintain an enterprise recovery runbook library with service mapping, dependencies, contact trees, and recovery playbooks for critical scenarios.
Coordinate disaster recovery communications plans including internal stakeholders, executives, customers, and suppliers. Ensure status reporting and post incident reviews drive improvements.
Provide executive level reporting on resilience practices aligned to common frameworks and metrics.