Site Reliability Engineer - Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
Charlesriverassociates · Boston, MA, United States; Chicago, IL, United States · Posted Jun 1, 2026
Apply on company site Track it in JobSkout
About Charles River Associates
For over 50 years, Charles River Associates has been a premier consulting firm that offers employees a place to learn from a diverse group of consultants, industry experts, and academics. At CRA you will be exposed to leading minds who use economic, financial, and business analysis to solve complex world problems for an impressive roster of clients, including major law firms, Fortune 100 companies, and government agencies. Through a collegial environment, formal and informal training opportunities, and a broad array of professional development resources, your experience at CRA will open doors for you throughout your career.
The Information Technology (ITS) department at Charles River Associates is currently a team of more than 40 professionals dedicated to enhancing, maintaining, and developing the firm's technology infrastructure and security. The team is comprised of four functions:
Service Delivery Telecom
Enterprise Application Solutions
Infrastructure, Networking and Cloud Solutions
Information Security
Information Technology staff are based in the Boston, Chicago, London, Munich, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, College Station and Washington, DC offices.
Mainly a Microsoft house, CRA is looking to maximize the performance of our on-premise systems and hybrid infrastructure, meaning experience with cloud technologies is essential for this role.
Position Overview
The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) helps ensure CRA’s critical business services are reliable, scalable, and performant across on-premises and cloud environments. This role blends software engineering and operations practices to reduce manual toil through automation, improve service observability, and strengthen incident response. The SRE partners closely with infrastructure, security, application, and service delivery teams to define measurable reliability targets (SLIs/SLOs), implement resilient architectures, and drive continuous improvement through blameless post-incident learning.
Key Responsibilities
Hands-on System Engineering experience with core enterprise infrastructure platforms and services, including Windows Server, VMware vSphere, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), SAN technologies, and the Rubrik ecosystem, with the ability to understand dependencies, recovery workflows, and failure modes across on-premises and cloud environments
Service Ownership Reliability Targets: Partner with service owners to define and maintain service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) for availability, latency, and performance; track error budgets and reliability risk.
Observability: Implement and continuously improve monitoring, logging, alerting, and dashboards to provide actionable, symptom-based signals and reduce mean time to detect/respond (MTTD/MTTR).
Blameless Postmortems Continuous Improvement: Facilitate post-incident reviews, identify root causes and contributing factors, and drive remediation items to completion; standardize learnings into runbooks and operational practices.
DR Testing Program Build-Out: Design and launch a scalable DR testing program (scope, test types, cadence, success criteria, and evidence capture) in partnership with application, infrastructure, and security teams; maintain runbooks and lead regular tabletop and technical recovery exercises to validate RTO/RPO assumptions and improve recoverability.
DR Readiness: Contribute to reliability architecture and disaster recovery readiness for key services, including dependency mapping, recovery testing inputs, and validation of recovery procedures.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work day-to-day with infrastructure, network, cloud, security, and application teams to improve operational excellence, reliability culture, and shared ownership of production outcomes.
Relevant Skills Experience
Experience operating and improving reliability of production services (on-prem and/or cloud), including incident response, operational readiness, and service ownership
Working knowledge of SRE concepts and practices such as SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, monitoring/alerting strategy, and blameless postmortems
Experience with observability tooling and practices (logs, metrics, tracing, dashboards) and using data to drive reliability and performance improvements
Experience with disaster recovery orchestration and recovery testing using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Azure Site Recovery (ASR) (or similar public cloud DR services)
Proven experience building and operating a DR testing program, including dependency mapping, test planning, coordination across stakeholders, execution of tabletop and technical failover tests, documentation of results, and tracking remediation actions to closure
Strong cross-functional communication and teamwork skills; comfortable partnering with engineering, security, and operations teams to drive shared outcomes
Ability to document and standardize operational procedures (runbo…