Specialist, Backup & Resiliency

Nutrien • Deerfield, IL

1d

About The Position

The Backup and Resiliency Technical Specialist is responsible for the stability, scalability, and continuous improvement of the enterprise backup and recovery platform. This role acts as the technical escalation point for backup services, provides architectural and capacity guidance for new backup deployments, and partners closely with Disaster Recovery (DR), Infrastructure, Cloud, and Application teams to ensure the organization’s data protection and recovery posture aligns with business and risk requirements.

In addition to deep technical expertise, this role contributes to the maturity of backup and disaster recovery practices through automation, reporting, documentation, and standards development.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a closely related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in IT operations or infrastructure roles.
• Strong server administration experience across Windows and Linux platforms.
• Hands-on experience with virtualized and cloud environments, including VMware, AWS, and Azure.
• Working knowledge of database backup and recovery concepts, including platforms such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP HANA.
• Experience with scripting and automation, using languages such as Python, Bash, or similar.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex technical issues and lead resolution efforts.
• Experience supporting enterprise-scale backup platforms and data protection solutions, such as cloud-native solutions in AWS and Azure, Veeam, and Cohesity DataProtect.
• Understanding of disaster recovery concepts, recovery objectives (RPO/RTO), and application resiliency patterns.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to think creatively and challenge existing approaches.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, able to work effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated commitment to continuous improvement, automation, and operational excellence.
• Experience supporting and interacting with teams that are geographically distributed.
• Strong understanding of data protection workflows, immutability, replication, and cloud archive/tiering.
• Experience performing restores (file-level, VM-level, application-aware).
• Ability to optimize cluster performance, storage utilization, and resiliency.
• Knowledge of Veeam backup job configuration, repositories, retention, and copy jobs.
• Familiarity with Veeam features such as SureBackup, Instant Recovery, WAN acceleration, and immutable repositories.
• Understanding of Veeam Availability Suite components.
• Strong understanding of data protection workflows, immutability, replication, and cloud archive/tiering.
• A working understanding of database backups (SQL, SAP, Oracle).
• Experience with multi-site backup strategies and DR design.
• Ability to manage and optimize large-scale backup environments across hybrid cloud (Azure/AWS).

Nice To Haves

• AIX and IBM POWER experience would be an asset.
• Knowledge of Cohesity DataProtect is an asset, including features like DataLock, Fort Knox, and Helios.

Responsibilities

• Support operational teams to ensure enterprise backups are enabled, running successfully, and free of systemic errors across all supported workloads.
• Act as the highest-level technical escalation for backup and recovery issues, including complex failures and restore scenarios.
• Provide design, sizing, capacity, and architectural guidance for new backup use cases and platform enhancements.
• Partner with infrastructure, cloud, and application teams to onboard new systems into backup services in alignment with standards and best practices.
• Identify risks, gaps, and improvement opportunities in the backup environment and drive remediation.
• Design and implement automation to improve backup operations, validation, and reporting.
• Develop and enhance health, compliance, and capacity reporting to support operational teams and leadership visibility.
• Support continuous optimization of backup performance, cost efficiency, and recoverability.
• Act as a technical partner to the Disaster Recovery program, supporting backup-related DR requirements and recovery strategies.
• Contribute to the development and maintenance of application DR plans, runbooks, and recovery artifacts as related to backup systems.
• Support DR exercises, technical validations, and quality reviews to ensure backup and recovery expectations can be met during real incidents.
• Ensure backup and recovery practices align with organizational risk tolerance, policy, and regulatory requirements.
• Maintain accurate, current technical documentation for backup platforms, architectures, and operational procedures.
• Contribute to the evolution of backup and DR standards, patterns, and guidance.
• Proactively evaluate new technologies, features, and approaches to improve data protection and resiliency.

Benefits

• comprehensive medical, dental, vision coverage, and life insurance and well as disability coverage for positions working more than 30 hours per week
• retirement program that encourages our employees to save for the longer term, with generous matching employer contributions
• paid vacation, sick days and holidays as well as paid personal and maternity/parental leaves and an Employee and Family Assistance Program
• annual incentive plan

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level