Disaster Recovery & Backup Lead

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with our colleagues working in stores across several retail fascias in many markets around the world. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day to day objectives.

Disaster Recovery & Backup Lead

JD Sports is undertaking a major transformation journey. The Disaster Recovery & Backup Lead is responsible for ensuring the organisation’s data resilience, system recoverability and backup documentation is available in the event of disasters, cyber incidents, or critical failures.

This role oversees the design, implementation, and maintenance of disaster recovery (DR) strategies, backup plans, backup solutions, recovery testing, and crisis response processes to minimize downtime and data loss. We are seeking a Disaster Recovery & Backup Lead to design and deliver the uplift of JD’s DR capability, building a compliant, testable, and business-aligned recovery framework across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. This is a pivotal role within the business that will help improve our ITGC and deliverables atest to this.

It will shape how JD plans, tests, and governs DR across technology services. The successful candidate will bring both strategic insightand practical delivery expertise, helping embed resilience and recovery into the organisation.

Responsibilities

• Strategy & Framework
• Lead the development of JD’s enterprise-wide DR strategy, ensuring alignment with Business Continuity, Cyber Recovery, and ITGC objectives.
• Develop, implement, and maintain enterprise disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity strategies.
• Assist BCP to build Business Impact Analyses (BIA) to identify critical systems and recovery priorities.
• Define Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) in collaboration with business and IT stakeholders.
• Define policies, standards, roles, and responsibilities for DR across all technology domains.
• Align the DR framework to ITIL v4 Service Continuity and NIST CSF 2.0 Respond/Recover functions.
• Support risk assessments and Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify critical services, dependencies, and RTO/RPO targets.
• Design & Implementation
• Build and operationalise DR plans for Tier 0 and Tier 1 systems, ensuring integration into service design and change management.
• Work with platform and service owners to implement fit-for-purpose DR solutions across hybrid and cloud infrastructure.
• Embed DR readiness criteria into gateway reviews (design, readiness, go-live) to ensure resilience is built in, not bolted on.
• Testing & Continuous Improvement
• Develop and execute regular disaster recovery drills and tabletop exercises.
• Document and track lessons learned to continuously improve DR capabilities.
• Coordinate with infrastructure, application, and security teams to ensure end-to-end recovery readiness.
• Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
• Partner with Information Security, GRC, Infrastructure, Application Owners, and Business Continuity teams.
• Champion resilience and DR awareness across Technology and Business.
• Provide regular reporting on DR posture and maturity to the Programme Director, CISO, and CTO.
• Incident Response & Crisis Management
• Act as primary point of contact during disaster events, coordinating response and recovery efforts.
• Ensure clear escalation paths and communication channels are followed during incidents.
• Liaise with business units to ensure critical services are restored within RTO targets.

Skills & Experience

• Demonstrable experience building or maturing DR programmes in complex environments.
• Deep knowledge of infrastructure, networking, cloud platforms, and data protection principles.
• Strong familiarity with ITIL v4 and NIST CSF 2.0 frameworks.
• Proven ability to translate resilience objectives into deliverable DR plans and test regimes.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills — able to work across technology, security, and business functions.

Preferred Certifications

• Bachelors Degree or relevant experience
• ITIL v4 Foundation (or higher)
• NIST CSF / Resilience or Information Security (CISSP, CISM)
• CBCP, CBCI, CBRM, or equivalent DR/BCP qualification

Benefits

We know our colleagues work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits including staff Discount On JD Group and other brands within the organisation and personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work. Thank you for your time #JD