Principal Engineer (Storage & Data Protection)
Palm Beach Gardens or Miami, FL (100% onsite)
Duration:
12-month contract
Pay:$71-76/hr
We are seeking a Principal Engineer to provide senior-level technical leadership for enterprise storage, backup, and cyber resiliency platforms. This role is responsible for designing, implementing, and evolving enterprise storage and data protection solutions across on-premises and cloud environments.
As a senior member of the infrastructure engineering team, you will drive platform strategy, architecture, automation, lifecycle management, operational standards, and major technology initiatives. This position emphasizes engineering, solution design, and long-term platform strategy rather than day-to-day administration.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the design, engineering, and implementation of enterprise storage and data protection platforms across hybrid infrastructure environments.
- Serve as the technical owner for storage and backup services, defining platform strategy, standards, lifecycle planning, and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Develop and maintain architecture standards, configuration baselines, operational procedures, recovery strategies, and security best practices.
- Engineer and support enterprise storage platforms, SAN infrastructure, and backup technologies.
- Design and enhance enterprise backup and recovery solutions, including backup policies, recovery workflows, retention strategies, and operational processes.
- Lead cyber resiliency initiatives focused on immutable backups, ransomware recovery, disaster recovery readiness, recovery validation, and data protection controls.
- Develop automation for storage and data protection operations using Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration management tools such as Ansible, Terraform, REST APIs, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Support cloud-based storage and backup strategies across public cloud environments, including hybrid storage architectures and cloud-native protection services.
- Establish lifecycle management standards covering capacity planning, patching, maintenance, upgrades, retention policies, and operational governance.
- Provide advanced troubleshooting for storage systems, SAN environments, backup platforms, replication, performance, capacity, and availability issues.
- Define enterprise storage and backup design patterns that address performance, scalability, security, monitoring, replication, recovery, and operational support requirements.
- Develop monitoring standards, alerting strategies, service catalog offerings, knowledge documentation, and configuration management practices.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure projects, disaster recovery initiatives, platform enhancements, and technology modernization efforts.
- Participate in architecture reviews, technical governance, implementation planning, documentation, and executive-level presentations.
- Lead technical workstreams while mentoring engineers and coordinating with vendors and managed service providers to resolve complex infrastructure challenges.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of infrastructure engineering experience, including at least 5 years focused on enterprise storage and/or data protection engineering.
- Strong experience designing and supporting enterprise storage, backup, replication, disaster recovery, and data protection solutions.
- Expertise with enterprise storage platforms, SAN technologies, and storage management tools.
- Experience administering enterprise backup and recovery platforms, including backup policy design, recovery workflows, operational support, and platform optimization.
- Strong understanding of cyber resiliency concepts, including immutable backups, ransomware recovery, disaster recovery planning, recovery validation, and backup compliance.
- Experience with storage performance analysis, capacity planning, replication, snapshot management, and high-availability architectures.
- Hands-on experience with automation and Infrastructure-as-Code using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, REST APIs, Git, and CI/CD practices.
- Experience supporting cloud storage services and hybrid cloud data protection architectures within AWS, Google Cloud, or similar platforms.
- Knowledge of enterprise monitoring, operational metrics, service management processes, and configuration management best practices.
- Demonstrated experience developing technical standards, roadmaps, documentation, operational procedures, and service models.
- Proven ability to lead technical initiatives and communicate effectively with engineering teams, business stakeholders, vendors, and executive leadership.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with enterprise NAS, SAN, and object storage technologies.
- Experience supporting cloud-native backup, archival, and disaster recovery services.
- Familiarity with enterprise data protection appliances and storage management platforms.
- Experience working within highly regulated, security-focused, or large-scale enterprise environments.
- Experience with enterprise monitoring and observability platforms.
- Knowledge of modern infrastructure automation and DevOps methodologies.
Education & Certifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
- Industry certifications related to enterprise storage, cloud platforms, backup technologies, automation, cybersecurity, or IT service management are highly desirable.
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