Resilience Engineer

Guidacent's client, a large, complex enterprise, needs help standing up a new Resilience Engineering function within a Central Engineering organization. This is a builder role for a highly experienced engineer who can operate at the intersection of performance engineering, systems reliability, and DR/BC compliance. This role is ideal for someone who has owned resilience or reliability outcomes end‑to‑end and is comfortable shaping strategy, defining standards, and influencing across engineering organizations without direct authority. The Opportunity Our client is merging an established Performance Engineering team with a Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity (DR/BC) compliance group. The Resilience Engineer will serve as the connective tissue between these two disciplines—translating regulatory and audit requirements into practical engineering standards, and converting performance and reliability data into measurable durability guarantees. You will design the resilience engineering practice largely from scratch, not inherit a mature program. Key Responsibilities • Own the DR/BC engineering plan, including resilience architecture principles and technical standards • Define and maintain the resilience engineering roadmap, aligned to regulatory, audit, and engineering needs • Translate compliance and regulatory requirements into actionable engineering requirements • Lead tabletop exercises, functional resilience testing, and recovery validation efforts • Establish and maintain the compliance evidence framework required for commissioning and audits • Partner closely with performance engineering, platform, and application teams to harden systems proactively • Use engineering data to validate and improve RTO/RPO assumptions and durability guarantees • Influence standards, patterns, and behaviors across teams without direct managerial authority Required Experience & Skills • 10+ years of engineering experience, with meaningful ownership of resilience, reliability, or durability outcomes • Senior Staff / Principal Engineer–level capability (or a hands‑on engineering manager with deep technical credibility) • Strong background in software and/or systems development • Deep experience in DR/BC and modern resilience engineering practices • Ability to communicate fluently with both engineers and compliance/audit stakeholders • Demonstrated experience defining standards and driving adoption across distributed teams • Hands-on experience with distributed systems failure modes — not just theory, but direct exposure to cascade failures, split-brain scenarios, or data consistency issues under partition • Demonstrated ability to write or meaningfully contribute to code, infrastructure-as-code, or automation tooling (not just review or advise) • Experience building or operating observability pipelines — metrics, tracing, logging — as inputs to resilience decisions, not just consuming dashboards • Proven track record of RTO/RPO validation through actual test execution, not just architecture review or documentatio Strongly Preferred • Hands‑on chaos engineering experience (e.g., injecting failure such as network partitions, dependency outages, or resource exhaustion to surface systemic weaknesses) • Fault injection experience at the component or infrastructure level to validate recovery behavior • SRE background or strong familiarity with SLO, error budget, and reliability frameworks • Experience operating in large‑scale, complex production environments • Experience with load shedding, graceful degradation, and bulkhead patterns implemented at the code or infrastructure layer • Familiarity with stateful service recovery — databases, queues, distributed caches — where recovery complexity is highest • Has personally written runbooks, game day scenarios, or failure mode catalogs that were then used operationally • Background in performance engineering tooling (load generation, profiling, capacity modeling) as a complement to resilience work — especially relevant given the team merger context Additional Notes • This role prioritizes strong development‑centric engineering backgrounds • Candidates whose experience is primarily compliance, audit, or documentation‑focused without hands‑on engineering impact may not be a fit • For this engagement, we are focused on candidates with non‑Microsoft‑centric backgrounds unless their experience clearly reflects deep, hands‑on development work Why Guidacent Guidacent is a consulting firm trusted by enterprise clients to solve complex technology and organizational challenges. Our consultants are empowered to shape outcomes, influence strategy, and leave systems better than they found them. This engagement offers a rare opportunity to design a resilience engineering function from the ground up at meaningful enterprise scale.