Find & Apply For Computer Systems Engineer / Architect Jobs in North Chicago, Illinois

Role:

SRE/Backup Engineer Location:

Chicago, IL or Tempe,AZ other client locations where a candidate could go into a local client office

Work Model:

Hybrid - onsite 3 days per week

Duration:

9+ Months Project Overview /

Contractor's Role:

SRE/BackUp Engineer We are seeking a highly technical Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with deep expertise in enterprise backup engineering, cyber recovery, and platform resiliency. This role will be responsible for engineering highly available, secure, and automated recovery capabilities that protect the organization against operational failures, ransomware, and other cyber threats. The ideal candidate combines traditional SRE principles—automation, observability, reliability engineering, and resilience—with extensive experience designing and operating enterprise backup platforms, immutable storage, air-gapped cyber vaults, isolated recovery environments (IREs), and recovery orchestration. This individual will partner closely with Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Cloud Engineering, Application Development, and Disaster Recovery teams to ensure critical services remain recoverable, resilient, and continuously validated.

Experience Level:

3 - Senior Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years in Backup Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering.
• 5+ years designing enterprise backup solutions.
• 3+ years supporting cyber recovery architectures.
• Experience implementing SRE principles within enterprise infrastructure environments.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and high availability architectures. Required Technical Skills Backup Technologies Experience with one or more:
• Cohesity
• Dell PowerProtect Data Manager
• Dell Data Domain
• Dell Cyber Recovery
• Rubrik
• Commvault
• Veritas NetBackup
• Veeam Cyber Recovery Experience designing and operating:
• Air-gapped vaults
• Immutable backups
• Clean Rooms
• Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE)
• Recovery orchestration
• Cyber resilience testing
• Ransomware recovery
• Recovery validation Cloud Platforms Experience with:
• Microsoft Azure
• AWS

Google Cloud Platform Including:

• Cloud-native backup
• Cross-region recovery
• Hybrid cloud resiliency Infrastructure
• VMware
• Hyper-V
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• Linux
• Windows Server
• Active Directory
• Enterprise storage platforms Automation Experience with:
• Ansible
• Terraform
• Python
• PowerShell
• Bash
• GitHub
• GitHub Actions
• CI/CD pipelines Observability Experience with:
• Dynatrace
• Grafana
• Prometheus
• Splunk
• ELK Stack

ServiceNow Security Knowledge of:

• Zero Trust architecture
• NIST Cybersecurity Framework
• CIS Controls
• Encryption and key management
• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Secure recovery processes Preferred Qualifications
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry.
• Experience supporting GSIB cyber resiliency programs.
• Knowledge of regulatory expectations from agencies such as the Federal Reserve, OCC, or FFIEC.
• Experience with chaos engineering and resilience testing.
• Familiarity with SRE tooling and reliability metrics.
• Experience implementing AI-assisted operations (AIOps) and predictive analytics. Leadership Competencies
• Strong systems thinking and engineering mindset.
• Excellent troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills.
• Ability to lead cross-functional technical recovery efforts.
• Strong communication and executive presentation skills.
• Proven ability to influence engineering standards and drive operational excellence.
• Commitment to continuous improvement through automation and reliability engineering. Key Responsibilities Site Reliability Engineering
• Engineer and maintain highly available, resilient enterprise platforms using SRE principles.
• Define and measure Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets for backup and recovery services.
• Develop automation to reduce operational toil and improve reliability.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and implement permanent corrective actions.
• Continuously improve platform reliability, scalability, performance, and recoverability.
• Establish proactive monitoring, alerting, and observability for backup and cyber recovery platforms.
• Participate in incident response and major incident recovery activities. Backup Engineering
• Design, implement, and administer enterprise backup and recovery solutions across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms.
• Engineer immutable backup architectures that support ransomware resilience.
• Design backup strategies for: o Virtual environments o Physical servers o Databases o Kubernetes/OpenShift o Cloud-native workloads o NAS/Object Storage o Enterprise applications
• Optimize backup performance, retention, replication, encryption, and recovery objectives.
• Implement policy