Job Description: Tech Lead – Storage, Cohesity, SQL, and Zerto
Position Title
Tech Lead – Storage
Department
Infrastructure Services / Enterprise Storage / Data Protection / IT Operations
Role Summary
We are seeking an experienced
Tech Lead – Storage to provide technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and operational ownership for enterprise storage, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery platforms. The ideal candidate will have strong experience with
Cohesity,
SQL Server backup and recovery, and
Zerto for disaster recovery and replication.
This role will lead storage and data protection initiatives across enterprise infrastructure environments, ensuring high availability, recoverability, performance, security, and operational stability. The Tech Lead will work closely with infrastructure, database, virtualization, cloud, cybersecurity, application, and operations teams to support business-critical systems and ensure storage, backup, and disaster recovery services meet enterprise requirements.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership and Storage Engineering
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Serve as the technical lead for enterprise storage, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery services.
- Lead the design, implementation, administration, and support of storage and data protection platforms.
- Provide hands-on technical guidance to infrastructure engineers, operations teams, and project teams.
- Evaluate current storage architecture and recommend improvements for scalability, performance, resiliency, and cost optimization.
- Support enterprise storage platforms across SAN, NAS, object storage, and cloud-integrated storage environments.
- Lead technical troubleshooting for storage performance, capacity, replication, backup, restore, and recovery issues.
- Participate in architecture reviews, infrastructure planning, capacity forecasting, and technology roadmap discussions.
- Ensure storage services are aligned with business continuity, security, compliance, and operational requirements.
Cohesity Responsibilities
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Administer and support Cohesity backup, recovery, replication, and data protection environments.
- Configure and manage protection policies, protection groups, backup jobs, retention policies, replication jobs, and recovery workflows.
- Perform backup and restore operations for virtual machines, physical servers, databases, file shares, and application workloads.
- Monitor Cohesity cluster health, storage utilization, deduplication, compression, job success rates, and platform performance.
- Troubleshoot failed backup jobs, restore failures, connectivity issues, agent issues, and policy misconfigurations.
- Support immutable backup, ransomware recovery, cyber resilience, and data protection best practices.
- Assist with Cohesity upgrades, patching, capacity expansion, and lifecycle management.
- Develop backup reporting, recovery validation, and audit-ready documentation.
Zerto Disaster Recovery Responsibilities
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Administer and support Zerto for disaster recovery, replication, failover, failback, and recovery testing.
- Configure and manage Virtual Protection Groups, recovery points, journals, replication policies, and recovery plans.
- Coordinate disaster recovery testing with infrastructure, application, database, and business teams.
- Perform planned migrations, failover testing, unplanned failover support, and failback activities.
- Monitor replication health, RPO status, journal usage, alerts, and recovery readiness.
- Troubleshoot Zerto replication, network, journal, VMware, storage, and recovery workflow issues.
- Maintain DR runbooks, recovery procedures, application dependency maps, and test evidence.
- Ensure disaster recovery capabilities align with business-defined RPO and RTO requirements.
SQL Server Backup and Recovery Responsibilities
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Partner with database teams to support SQL Server backup, recovery, and data protection requirements.
- Ensure SQL databases are properly protected through backup policies, recovery schedules, retention standards, and restore procedures.
- Support SQL-aware backup and recovery workflows using Cohesity or other enterprise backup tools.
- Assist with database restore requests, point-in-time recovery coordination, and recovery validation.
- Understand SQL Server backup types, including full, differential, and transaction log backups.
- Support backup and recovery considerations for SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, clustered SQL environments, and critical database workloads.
- Collaborate with DBAs to validate backup integrity, restore testing, and disaster recovery readiness.
- Help troubleshoot backup failures related to SQL permissions, VSS, agents, connectivity, storage capacity, and database configuration.
Storage Operations and Support
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Manage storage provisioning, allocation, expansion, reclamation, monitoring, and performance tuning.
- Support storage protocols and technologies such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, object storage, snapshots, replication, and tiering.
- Monitor storage capacity, latency, throughput, IOPS, availability, and utilization trends.
- Respond to storage-related incidents, service requests, alerts, and escalations.
- Participate in root cause analysis for storage, backup, restore, and DR-related incidents.
- Coordinate planned maintenance, upgrades, patching, firmware updates, and change activities.
- Ensure operational documentation, knowledge articles, standard operating procedures, and escalation guides are maintained.
- Support after-hours maintenance windows and critical incident response as needed.
Project and Change Management
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Lead or support storage, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery projects.
- Plan and execute migrations, platform upgrades, storage expansions, backup redesigns, DR improvements, and infrastructure modernization efforts.
- Develop implementation plans, rollback plans, risk assessments, communication plans, and validation steps for infrastructure changes.
- Participate in change management processes and ensure all technical changes are documented, reviewed, approved, and executed safely.
- Coordinate with cross-functional teams to minimize risk and business disruption during storage and DR activities.
- Provide clear technical status updates to infrastructure leadership and stakeholders.
Security, Compliance, and Resiliency
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Ensure storage and backup platforms follow enterprise security, access control, encryption, and compliance standards.
- Support audit requests related to backup evidence, restore testing, retention policies, DR testing, and operational controls.
- Implement and maintain role-based access controls for storage, backup, and DR platforms.
- Support cyber recovery and ransomware recovery planning.
- Ensure backup and recovery environments are protected against unauthorized access, accidental deletion, and operational failure.
- Help define and validate recovery strategies for critical applications, databases, and infrastructure services.
Required Qualifications
-
Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; equivalent experience may be considered.
- 7+ years of experience in enterprise infrastructure, storage administration, backup/recovery, or disaster recovery.
- 3+ years of experience in a technical lead, senior engineer, or infrastructure lead role.
- Hands-on experience administering and supporting Cohesity.
- Hands-on experience with Zerto disaster recovery, replication, failover, and failback.
- Strong understanding of SQL Server backup and recovery concepts.
- Experience supporting enterprise storage platforms across SAN, NAS, object, or cloud-integrated storage environments.
- Strong understanding of backup policies, retention, replication, deduplication, compression, snapshots, and recovery validation.
- Experience with virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Familiarity with Windows Server, Linux, Active Directory, DNS, networking, and enterprise infrastructure dependencies.
- Strong troubleshooting skills across storage, backup, database, virtualization, and network layers.
- Experience participating in infrastructure change management, incident management, and problem management processes.
- Strong documentation, communication, and technical leadership skills.
- Ability to work with technical teams, business stakeholders, vendors, and leadership.
Preferred Qualifications
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Cohesity certification or advanced hands-on Cohesity administration experience.
- Zerto certification or advanced Zerto disaster recovery experience.
- Microsoft SQL Server administration, backup, or recovery experience.
- Experience with ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Remedy, ManageEngine, or similar ITSM tools.
- Experience in healthcare, financial services, government, insurance, or other regulated environments.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
- Experience with automation or scripting using PowerShell, Python, Ansible, or REST APIs.
- Experience with storage platforms from vendors such as NetApp, Dell EMC, Pure Storage, HPE, IBM, or similar.
- Experience supporting cyber recovery, immutable backup, air-gapped backup, or ransomware recovery strategies.
- Familiarity with ITIL-based operational processes.
Required Technical Skills
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Enterprise Storage Administration
- Cohesity Backup and Recovery
- Zerto Disaster Recovery
- SQL Server Backup and Recovery
- SAN and NAS Storage
- Storage Replication
- Backup Policy Management
- Restore and Recovery Testing
- Disaster Recovery Planning
- VMware or Hyper-V
- Windows Server and Linux Infrastructure
- Storage Performance Troubleshooting
- Capacity Planning
- Incident and Change Management
- Technical Documentation
- Vendor Coordination
- Infrastructure Project Delivery
