Director, IT Resilience Engineering- Hybrid

You will build and lead a team of five Senior Staff Engineers. It is a deliberately small and deliberately senior group, each engineer anchored to one resilience domain, all of them deployed against the highest recovery risk in the portfolio at any given time. The team is built for depth rather than capacity: engineers credible on compute, network, storage, cloud and operations in the same conversation, operating where a single infrastructure tower cannot reach.

This is an engineering leadership role, not a programme management role. You will own the recovery architecture for tier one systems, the validation regime that proves recovery works, and the engineering delivery of manufacturing continuity across a global factory footprint.

WHAT YOU WILL DO
Own recovery architecture. Design active, active topologies, failover paths and blast radius containment for tier one systems, and set the reference architecture the infrastructure towers build against.
Prove recovery, do not document it. Establish and run the recovery validation regime. A system counts as recoverable only when a test has succeeded inside the committed window and the result is evidenced.
Lead manufacturing continuity. Act as engineering owner for the manufacturing continuity programme: dual data centre topology, network segmentation, database resilience and cyber recovery for factory critical systems, starting in Asia Pacific and extending globally.
Build the cyber recovery capability. Own immutable backup, vaulting and orchestrated recovery, engineered to a recovery objective rather than procured to a vendor feature list.
Build and hold the hiring bar. Recruit, develop and retain five Senior Staff Engineers at a standard materially above the organisation average, and deploy them against risk rather than against a fixed tower.
Delegate rather than gate. Each engineer holds the deciding technical view in their own domain and engages peer teams, security and suppliers directly. Routing every decision through you would be a failure of the operating model.
Lead across distance. One of your engineers is based in Malaysia. Keeping that engineer as influential as those in California is an explicit leadership obligation, not a scheduling problem.
Arbitrate across the organisation. Chair the cross team resilience architecture forum. Where designs conflict on a resilience requirement, you hold the deciding technical view.
Govern supplier technical performance. Set and hold the resilience requirements a large managed service provider is measured against, including through a transition.
Represent the engineering position. Speak for resilience engineering to IT leadership and to audit level audiences.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
We are looking for the right capability rather than a specific number of years. The experience indication below is typical, not a filter; a leader who has genuinely done this work in less time will be considered.
Typically twelve or more years in infrastructure engineering, including at least four leading senior technical staff.
Demonstrated ownership of a disaster recovery or business continuity programme at enterprise scale, including executed recovery tests with evidenced outcomes against defined objectives. Authoring a plan does not meet this bar.
Deep hands on credibility in at least three of: compute and virtualisation, enterprise networking, storage and data protection, public cloud architecture, production operations.
Direct experience engineering cyber recovery: immutable backup, isolated recovery environments, and orchestrated restore of critical systems following a destructive event.
A track record of influencing and arbitrating across peer engineering organisations without authority over them.
Experience presenting technical risk positions to executive and audit level audiences without softening them.
Experience setting the technical requirements that govern a large managed service provider, ideally through a transition.
Experience leading a geographically distributed technical team, including reports in Asia Pacific.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
Semiconductor, or another continuous operations manufacturing environment where downtime carries direct production cost.
A demonstrated record of developing senior individual contributors into leadership roles.
Experience standing up a resilience or reliability function from scratch rather than inheriting one.

LEVEL EXPECTATIONS
Leads senior technical staff and is accountable for staffing, budget and functional outcomes.
Drives strategy and execution across a significant functional area.
Makes architecture and resourcing decisions that affect multiple organisations.
This role is not filled by a competent infrastructure manager. We are looking for a practicing engineer whom other strong engineers choose to follow, equally credible in a failure postmortem and in front of the IT Leadership Team.