DR Platform Engineer

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a DR Platform Engineer for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in LATAM. Our client is in the food industry, located in Seattle, Washington, runs its daily operations from its own on-premises data center, which is its primary infrastructure. Its production systems run on VMware there. Zerto replicates them to AWS for disaster recovery, and Rubrik handles backups. The environment holds about 10 to 20 TB of data, with under 10 GB changing per day. Nearly all staff work on virtual desktops, and Amazon WorkSpaces is set up on the recovery side. Core systems include Microsoft Dynamics GP on SQL Server, a warehouse management system, EDI and several integrations. Production has never been failed over to AWS and back.

A two-person Svitla team will map every dependency and fix the recovery environment, test recovery in isolation (including a load test and a ransomware recovery test), run staged production tests up to a full failover and failback, and hand over runbooks the client's IT team can follow.

In this role, you will own the recovery environment in AWS, covering networking, replication, identity, Amazon WorkSpaces, infrastructure as code, and monitoring. You will close the gaps identified during discovery and prepare each system for failover.

You will work side by side with the DR Lead Engineer, who owns the program, the test plan, and the client relationship, and you will run every failover together. You will plan your work and the test windows, and coordinate changes, with our project manager. Our CTO reviews progress weekly and takes part in milestone and go/no-go meetings.

Time zone: ahead of U.S. Pacific Time (PT)

Requirements

• AWS (3+ years of hands-on production experience)
• Experience bringing replicated VMware machines up on EC2, including instance sizing, drivers, boot issues, and IP changes.
• Experience designing VPCs, including an isolated test network with no route to production.
• Experience setting up site-to-site VPN between an on-premises firewall and AWS.
• Experience with Route 53: hosted zones, DNS cutover and failback, and TTL planning.
• Experience with IAM, with recovery credentials kept separate from production accounts.
• Experience with AWS Directory Service, including AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
• Experience with Amazon WorkSpaces for several hundred users: images, bundles, user profiles, capacity planning, and phased migration of users in waves.
• Experience with CloudWatch, Systems Manager, and EBS and S3 snapshots.
• Hands-on experience with Zerto and AWS as the recovery site: Virtual Protection Groups, test and live failovers, reverse protection and failback, and point-in-time recovery from the journal.
• Experience with Rubrik or a similar platform: restore validation and restores into an isolated environment.
• Experience running Active Directory in a DR site: domain controllers, FSMO roles, avoiding USN rollback, and AD-integrated DNS.
• Experience with certificates, Group Policy, file shares, and service accounts.
• Understanding of how SSO and MFA sign-in (for example, Okta) behaves during a failover.
• Experience managing firewall rules, NAT, and public IP changes during failover.
• Experience handling inbound partner connections and IP allow-lists (EDI, remote access).
• Experience measuring latency between users, AWS, and on-premises databases.
• Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Strong PowerShell skills (the environment is mostly Windows) and Python skills.
• Experience scripting SQL Server recovery steps: restores, log shipping, connection strings, and SQL Agent jobs.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting for replication health.
• Hands-on experience running full production failovers and failbacks.
• Experience documenting architecture and changes, and preparing every production change, with rollback steps, for the client’s change control.
• Fluent English and the ability to work directly with the client’s network engineer and DBA.

Will be a plus

• AWS Advanced Networking, SysOps, or Solutions Architect Professional certification, or Zerto certification.
• Experience with Omnissa Horizon (formerly VMware Horizon) VDI and FSLogix profiles.
• Enough Azure knowledge to map the client’s Azure-hosted services and any backups stored there.
• Experience with EDI connectivity (AS2, SFTP).
• Experience with 24/7 operations.

Responsibilities

• Assess Zerto replication coverage and health, Rubrik policies, AWS networking, DNS, identity, and WorkSpaces images.
• Validate the network topology using automated discovery.
• Close replication gaps and right-size the recovery servers.
• Build the AWS network layer, including Route 53 DNS cutover, security groups, VPN, and inbound partner access.
• Set up identity in AWS and evaluate AWS Managed Microsoft AD.
• Prepare Amazon WorkSpaces capacity, images, and user profiles for several hundred users.
• Script the database recovery steps and the application settings that change during a failover.
• Implement monitoring and alerting for replication health.
• Codify the environment as infrastructure as code where it makes sense.
• Run isolated failovers, the load test, and the ransomware recovery test.
• Run the pilot, user waves, a failover rehearsal, and a sustained failover with failback.
• Stay on call for every test window.
• Document the DR architecture and hand over monitoring.
• Walk the client’s IT team through the environment.