Senior Backup Engineer

About Airways:

Our people manage New Zealand's 30 million square kms of airspace, providing air traffic control, surveillance, communication, flight inspection, mapping, and airspace design services. We work with government, regulatory authorities, airlines, airports, and the general aviation community to ensure pilots, passengers and goods reach their destination - safely. At Airways, our values underpin all that we do. We value Safety, One Airways, Excellence and Success in all that we do.

Our organisation is made up of operational business groups that are supported by governance and corporate services functions. To learn more about our people and organisational structure, check out www.airways.co.nz/about.

About the Team:

The Technology Team is responsible for all technology disciplines within the air navigation services environment – engineering design, software design and development, systems architecture and infrastructure, asset management, installation and maintenance, technical training, workload planning, maintenance program development, project management, and logistics support.

The purpose of the IT\&SM team is to improve the performance of the organisation and to support and enable the Airways strategy through IT and Digital services and leadership.

IT\&SM lead the provision of good practice IT and digital services and systems in the areas of workplace technology, corporate business applications, digital engagement, digital document management, Information management, IT operations and desktop support.

About the Role:

We’re expanding our IT\&SM team with an opportunity available for a Senior Backup Engineer to join us on a permanent full-time basis at our Christchurch campus.

Reporting to the National IT Operations Manager, you’ll ensure the ongoing availability, recoverability and stability of Airways' backup and data protection services across the organisation.

You’ll hold shared accountability with the Principal Backup Engineer for the backup environment, providing a second point of deep platform capability across Airways' infrastructure estates.

Key responsibilities include but aren’t limited to:

• Daily monitoring and verification of backup and replication services
• Scheduling recovery testing and validation against agreed recovery objectives
• Proactively resolving issues and escalating as needed
• Maintaining the overall health of the backup environment
• Planning, executing and validating recovery testing against defined recovery point and recovery time objectives
• Assessing backup, recovery and retention requirements for new services and for infrastructure change
• Producing and maintaining system level documentation, runbooks and recovery procedures

Providing backup, recovery and retention design input to infrastructure projects and to new services entering the Airways environment.
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For a full list of tasks and responsibilities, refer to the position description attached to the advert on our careers site.

About You:

Due to the nature of our operations and the role, you’ll hold the necessary networking fundamentals to diagnose backup and replication traffic issues (routing, switching, VLANs, firewalls) with the ability to independently troubleshoot complex issues.

You’ll be comfortable providing support and coverage where required and and participating in the on-call roster to ensure service continuity.

Additionally, you will hold:

• 5+ years' enterprise infrastructure engineering experience, including:
• • 3+ years with direct responsibility for enterprise backup, replication and disaster recovery at enterprise level and across multiple infrastructure estates
  • Administration, troubleshooting and recovery operations i.e. using Veeam or other market leading backup solution
  • Working with backup and recovery of virtualised workloads on VMware vSphere and Nutanix AHV
  • Backup and recovery of physical standalone workloads i.e. using Bare Metal Restore procedures.
• Exposure to:
• • Enterprise backup infrastructure, tape library technologies, and storage platforms, including HPE StoreOnce, HPE Alletra, and HPE Apollo solutions
  • Immutable, air gapped and offline backup design, including recovery from ransomware and data corruption events
  • Microsoft Windows Server operating systems
  • Microsoft Active Directory services, including application-consistent backup, authoritative and non-authoritative recovery, and service restoration
  • Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 data protection, and backup and recovery services
  • PowerShell scripting for backup automation, validation and reporting.
• Sound understanding of ITIL standards and processes, particularly incident, problem and change management.
• Proficiency needed to apply cyber resilience principles to data protection, including immutability, retention and recovery assurance.
• Knowledge of IT infrastructure standards, datacentre operations and enterprise architecture principles.
• Skill needed to relay technical risks and recovery status to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to work in a dynamic business, collaborate with people, show resilience and agility, take ownership and focus on delivering successful outcomes.

Beneficial:

• Experience working in a regulated, safety critical or 24x7 operational environment.
• Relevant tertiary qualification (diploma or degree) or equivalent vendor certification.
• Veeam certification (VMCE) or equivalent vendor backup certification.
• Exposure to backup and recovery of UNIX and Linux workloads.
• Experience working with HPE Compute (DL ProLiant) hardware.
• Knowledge of current and legacy applications and tools within a long-lived estate.
• Experience contributing data protection and recovery requirements at project design stage.

About Our Offering:

Airways offers a competitive package inclusive of a solid base salary and a generous superannuation scheme with employer contributions of up to 11% of earnings (T\&Cs). We also offer five (5) weeks annual leave, vast learning opportunities, career progression opportunities, and a hybrid working model that provides flexibility and support.

Airways is a great place to work, with an international reputation for innovation and success.

To Apply:

If you are keen to work with the best in the game and to stretch yourself in a complex, challenging and rewarding environment - submit your application (CV and cover letter) via the Airways careers site or Seek.

Please note that you must be legally eligible to work in New Zealand to be considered.

This role will require the successful candidate to undergo pre-employment background checks including references, drug and alcohol screening, criminal conviction, and related checks.

Application closing date is Tuesday, 8 September 2026.

At Airways, our people are at the heart of what we do to keep NZ skies safe. We are committed to creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace where people feel they belong and can bring their whole self to work. We make our recruitment decisions based on the best candidate for the job and encourage applications from diverse candidates. We are proud to hold both Rainbow Tick and Gender Tick accreditations.

Permanent Full Time

Job no: (TG - BL - CH)

Location: Christchurch

Closing Date: Tuesday, 8 September 2026