Corporate Vice President - Disaster Recovery and Resiliency Architect

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per quarter 

New York Life is standing up a repeatable, automation-first Disaster Recovery (DR) operating model to ensure the company can sustain a Minimum Viable Company (MVC) and recover priority services within 48 hours. As the DR Recovery Lead (IT Operations), you will be the single-threaded owner for day-to-day DR operations—driving orchestrated recovery execution, maintaining infrastructure and application runbooks, coordinating cross-technology teams and vendors, and ensuring audit-ready evidence for quarterly exercises and an annual recovery test calendar. You will align DR capabilities with enterprise architecture and regulatory standards while continuously improving resiliency across the organization.

What You’ll Do:

• Own disaster recovery operations and runbooks by building, maintaining, and continuously improving infrastructure and application recovery documentation, including integrations and upstream/downstream dependencies, aligned with the enterprise DR framework and RACI
• Execute automation-first, orchestrated recoveries using infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and evidence harnesses to capture artifacts, health checks, and outcomes for audit purposes
• Plan and lead quarterly tabletop and functional DR validations, manage an annual DR exercise calendar, and coordinate test execution, evidence collection, and acceptance with business owners
• Safeguard DR environments by monitoring configuration parity and drift, ensuring capacity and readiness across failover patterns, and coordinating change windows with APSO and CAB
• Coordinate secure restoration activities, including IAM, keys, certificates, and control re-enablement, in alignment with cyber incident response procedures
• Partner with DBA and data teams to ensure data recovery integrity through backup/restore or replication, validation, and reconciliation processes
• Define and execute service health verification using synthetic probes, SLIs, SLOs, and dashboards to validate recoverability
• Manage third-party vendors by coordinating SLAs, negotiating test windows, and validating contractual obligations and evidence
• Maintain and prioritize Critical Business Service (CBS) inventories and dependency mappings, scaling DR playbooks across priority services
• Serve as the DR operations lead during activations, coordinating communications and cross-technology execution through recovery

Added Focus Areas

• Ensure architectural alignment by validating DR strategies, patterns, and runbooks against enterprise architecture standards, reference architectures, and future-state infrastructure plans; participate in design reviews and define DR non-functional requirements
• Engineer and operate DR solutions across on-premises and multi-cloud environments (e.g., AWS and Azure), leveraging cloud-native patterns such as active/active, regional failover, immutable infrastructure, and serverless recovery
• Embed regulatory and compliance controls by maintaining audit-ready evidence and traceability aligned with NYDFS, SOX, GDPR, NIST (e.g., SP 800-34 and 800-61), and ISO 22301 requirements
• Drive continuous improvement through quarterly DR improvement backlogs, piloting emerging techniques such as chaos engineering, game days, and AI-assisted recovery validation, while retiring manual processes and reporting ROI

Who You’ll Work With

• Enterprise Architecture and Value Stream architects
• Application owners and development teams
• IT Operations, Security, DBA/Data, and SRE/Observability teams
• APSO and Change Management
• Key vendors and third-party partners

What You’ll Bring:

• 8+ years of experience in IT Operations, SRE, Disaster Recovery, or equivalent enterprise resiliency roles
• Hands-on experience with DR patterns such as active/active and active/passive, backup and restore, replication, and hybrid or multi-cloud infrastructure
• Strong automation and infrastructure-as-code expertise (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, or Python)
• Proven experience planning and executing DR tests, from tabletop exercises through functional validation, with rigorous evidence capture
• Familiarity with restoring security controls, including IAM, PKI, and secrets, aligned with cyber incident response runbooks
• Strong observability expertise, including health checks, synthetic probes, SLIs, SLOs, and dashboards
• Experience managing vendors, coordinating change and incident processes (e.g., APSO and CAB), and facilitating cross-functional execution in RACI-governed programs
• Ability to interpret enterprise architecture standards and reference architectures, with working knowledge of regulatory requirements including NYDFS, SOX, GDPR, NIST, and ISO 22301 as they apply to DR
• Excellent communication, leadership, and decision-making skills, particularly in high-pressure situations

Nice to Have

• Experience in financial services or other highly regulated industries
• Relevant certifications such as ITIL, AWS or Azure Architect/Operations, DRII/BCI, or security certifications (e.g., CISSP, GCIH)
• Experience with chaos engineering, game-day design, and AI-assisted testing or recovery validation

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Pay Transparency

Salary Range: $119,000-$170,000 

Overtime eligible: Exempt 

Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes 

Sales bonus eligible: No 

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

Our Benefits

We provide a full package of benefits for employees – and have unique offerings for a modern workforce, including leave programs, adoption assistance, and student loan repayment programs. Based on feedback from our employees, we continue to refine and add benefits to our offering, so that you can flourish both inside and outside of work. Click here to discover more about our comprehensive benefit options or visit our NYL Benefits Site.

Our Commitment to Inclusion
At New York Life, fostering an inclusive workplace is fundamental to who we are and how we serve our communities. We have a longstanding commitment to creating an environment where individuals can contribute their best and succeed together. This foundation is rooted in our core values of humanity and integrity, ensuring that every employee feels valued and supported. By embracing a broad range of perspectives and experiences, we achieve greater success and fulfill our promise of providing financial security and peace of mind to families across all communities. Click here to learn more about New York Life’s leadership in this space.​

Recognized as one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies, New York Life is committed to improving local communities through a culture of employee giving and volunteerism, supported by the Foundation. We're proud that due to our mutuality, we operate in the best interests of our policy owners. To learn more about career opportunities at New York Life, please visit the Careers page of www.NewYorkLife.com.

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Job Requisition ID: 93375