The Disaster Recovery Specialist develops and maintains comprehensive disaster recovery strategies to ensure continuity of IT services supporting mission-critical systems in a highly regulated federal environment. This role leads risk and impact assessments to identify critical applications, infrastructure, and dependencies, defining recovery objectives and strategies that align with organizational resilience goals. The specialist coordinates regular exercises, tests, and plan reviews with IT and business stakeholders, capturing lessons learned and driving continuous improvement of disaster recovery capabilities while providing subject-matter guidance, training, and documentation to ensure teams understand their roles before, during, and after disruptive events.
Key Responsibilities
Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans, runbooks, and playbooks for key IT services, defining recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), escalation paths, and communication protocols aligned with enterprise resilience requirements.
Conduct risk assessments and business impact analyses to identify critical systems, data, locations, and third-party dependencies, using findings to prioritize recovery sequencing and controls for mission-critical operations.
Coordinate and execute a structured disaster recovery testing program, including tabletop exercises, component tests, partial failover, and full failover events, documenting test results, gaps, and remediation actions to strengthen preparedness.
Partner with infrastructure, application, network, and security teams to ensure backup, replication, high-availability, and failover mechanisms are designed and operated to meet approved recovery objectives and compliance requirements.
Monitor changes to the IT environment to ensure disaster recovery documentation, configurations, and inventories remain accurate and aligned with current production architectures and operational standards.
Develop and deliver training and awareness materials so IT staff and business stakeholders understand disaster recovery procedures, roles, and decision paths under various disruption scenarios.
Ensure disaster recovery plans adhere to organizational policies, regulatory requirements, and industry frameworks, preparing evidence for audits, assessments, and leadership reviews to demonstrate compliance and readiness.
Track and report key disaster recovery metrics and readiness indicators, providing actionable recommendations to improve resilience of infrastructure, applications, and supporting processes across the enterprise.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Administration, or related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
4–7 years of experience in disaster recovery, business continuity, IT operations, or closely related resilience functions within complex IT environments.
Demonstrated understanding of disaster recovery principles, frameworks, and best practices, with proven experience developing and maintaining DR plans, conducting risk assessments, and performing regular testing.
Active SECRET security clearance or ability to obtain and maintain required clearance.
U.S. citizenship as required for federal contracting environment.
Excellent problem-solving, analytical, communication, and interpersonal skills with the ability to manage multiple tasks and projects effectively.
Less than 10% travel required.
Preferred Qualifications
Professional certifications related to business continuity or disaster recovery, such as Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP), CISSP, or similar credentials demonstrating specialized resilience knowledge.
Experience integrating disaster recovery planning with broader business continuity and incident response programs within federal or highly regulated environments.
Familiarity with disaster recovery testing tools, backup and replication platforms (such as Veeam, Commvault, or cloud-based recovery solutions), and cloud-based recovery capabilities supporting hybrid infrastructure.
Background working with federal IT policies and compliance frameworks such as NIST, FISMA, or FedRAMP in support of resilience and continuity operations.
Compensation Ranges
Compensation ranges for ASM Research positions vary depending on multiple factors; including but not limited to, location, skill set, level of education, certifications, client requirements, contract-specific affordability, government clearance and investigation level, and years of experience. The compensation displayed for this role is a general guideline based on these factors and is unique to each role. Monetary compensation is one component of ASM's overall compensation and benefits package for employees.
EEO Requirements
It is the policy of ASM that an individual's race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation or national origin are not and will not be considered in any personnel or management decisions. We affirm our commitment to these fundamental policies.
All recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting for all job classifications is done without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, or age. All decisions on employment are made to abide by the principle of equal employment.
Physical Requirements
The physical requirements described in "Knowledge, Skills and Abilities" above are representative of those which must be met by an employee to successfully perform the primary functions of this job. (For example, "light office duties' or "lifting up to 50 pounds" or "some travel" required.) Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with qualifying disabilities, who are otherwise qualified, to perform the primary functions.
Disclaimer
The preceding job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.