Senior Associate - DR Recovery Lead (IT Operations)

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per quarter
As part of Technology, you'll have the opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking initiatives that shape New York Life's digital landscape. Leverage cutting-edge technologies like Generative AI to increase productivity, streamline processes, and create seamless experiences for clients, agents, and employees. Your expertise fuels innovation, agility, and growth - driving the company's success.
Role Summary
New York Life is standing up a repeatable, automation-first Disaster Recovery (DR) operating model to ensure we can sustain a Minimum Viable Company (MVC) and recover priority services within 48 hours. As the DR Recovery Lead (IT Ops), you will be the single-threaded owner for day-to-day DR operations-driving orchestration execution, maintaining infra/app runbooks, coordinating cross-tech teams and vendors, and ensuring audit-ready evidence for quarterly exercises and an annual recovery test calendar. You'll also align DR with enterprise architecture and regulatory standards and continuously improve our capabilities.
What You'll Do

• Own DR operations & runbooks: Build, maintain, and continuously improve infrastructure and application recovery runbooks (including integrations and upstream/downstream interfaces) aligned to the enterprise DR framework and RACI.
• Execute orchestrated recoveries: Lead automation-first recovery using IaC/pipelines and evidence harness to capture artifacts, health checks, and outcomes for audit.
• Plan & run tests: Lead quarterly tabletop/functional validations, drive an annual DR exercise calendar, and manage test evidence and acceptance with business owners.
• Safeguard environments: Monitor configuration parity and drift; ensure DR capacity/readiness across failover patterns; coordinate change windows with APSO/CAB.
• Restore securely: Coordinate restoration of IAM, keys/certs, and control re-enablement in alignment with cyber-incident procedures.
• Recover data with integrity: Partner with DBA/Data teams on backup/restore or replication, validation, and reconciliation steps.
• Prove service health: Define and run synthetic probes/SLIs/SLOs and publish dashboards to verify recoverability.
• Manage vendors: Orchestrate third-party SLAs, negotiate test windows, and validate contractual obligations and evidence.
• Map & prioritize services: Maintain Critical Business Service (CBS) inventories and dependencies; scale playbooks across priority CBS.
• Lead during incidents: Serve as DR operations lead for activation, coordinating comms and cross-tech execution through recovery.

Added Focus Areas

• Architectural alignment: Ensure DR strategies, patterns, and runbooks conform to enterprise architecture standards, reference architectures, and future-state infrastructure plans; participate in design reviews and provide DR non-functional requirements.
• Multi-cloud & cloud-native DR: Engineer and operate DR solutions across on-prem and multi-cloud environments (e.g., AWS/Azure), leveraging cloud-native patterns such as active/active, regional failover, immutable infrastructure, and serverless recovery.
• Regulatory & compliance: Embed controls and evidence to meet NYDFS, SOX, GDPR, and related obligations; align to NIST (e.g., SP 800-34/61) and ISO 22301 principles; maintain audit-ready artifacts and traceability.
• Continuous improvement & innovation: Drive quarterly improvement backlogs; pilot emerging techniques (e.g., chaos engineering/game days, AI-assisted recovery validation), retire manual steps, and report ROI.

Who You'll Bring:
Enterprise Architecture (EA), Value Stream (VS) architects, App Owners/Devs, IT Ops, Security, DBA/Data, SRE/Observability, APSO/Change Management, and key vendors/third parties.
Qualifications

• 8+ years in IT Operations / SRE / DR or equivalent enterprise resiliency roles.
• Hands-on experience with DR patterns (active/active, active/passive), backup/restore & replication, and hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure.
• Strong automation/IaC background (e.g., Terraform/CloudFormation), CI/CD pipelines, and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, or Python).
• Proven test planning & execution (tabletops through functional validation) with rigorous evidence capture.
• Familiarity with security control restoration (IAM, PKI, secrets) and alignment to cyber-incident runbooks.
• Observability expertise (health checks, synthetic probes, SLIs/SLOs, dashboards).
• Effective vendor management, change/incident coordination (e.g., APSO/CAB), and cross-functional facilitation in a RACI-governed program.
• Architecture & compliance literacy: ability to interpret EA standards and reference architecture; working knowledge of NYDFS, SOX, GDPR, NIST, and ISO 22301 expectations as they relate to DR.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and decision-making under pressure.

Nice to Have

• Financial services or other regulated-industry experience.
• Certifications: ITIL, AWS/Azure architect/ops, DRII/BCI, or security (e.g., CISSP, GCIH).

Experience with chaos engineering, game-day design, and AI-assisted testing or recovery validation
Pay Transparency
Salary Range: $108,500-$155,500
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.
Company Overview
At New York Life, our 180-year legacy of purpose and integrity fuels our future. As we evolve into a more technology-, data-, and AI-enabled organization, we remain grounded in the values that drive lasting impact.
Our diverse business portfolio creates opportunities to make a difference across industries and communities-inviting bold thinking, collaborative problem-solving, and purpose-driven innovation. Here, you'll find the rare balance of long-standing stability and forward momentum, supported by an inclusive team that honors tradition while embracing progress.
As a Fortune 100 mutual company, we offer a place to grow your skills, contribute to meaningful work, and deliver solutions that matter. Your ideas drive what's next, and your growth powers it.
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 hereto 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.
Visit our LinkedIn to see how our employees and agents are leading the industry and impacting communities.
Visit our Newsroom to learn more about how our company is constantly evolving to meet our clients' and employees' needs.
Job Requisition ID: 92942