Senior Specialist, Systems Administration

Job Title: Senior Specialist, Systems Administration

Job Location: Ottawa, ON

Job Code: 44558

Job Schedule: Day Shift

Compensation Range: Between $79,500 - $129,500 CDN annually

As a key member of the Global IT Operations team, you will help strengthen, modernize, and scale the company's core IT and cloud services across your region. You will work at the intersection of systems, hybrid networks, AWS cloud platforms, and automation tooling to ensure reliable, secure, and high-quality services for a highly technical workforce.

In this role, you will focus heavily on supporting AWS workloads, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to design, build, and update networks, VPCs, and cloud services. Crucially, you will play a key role in assisting and supporting our ongoing migration of legacy and on-premises workloads, networks, and services to AWS. You will play an important role in improving operational maturity, enhancing service quality, and contributing to a culture of accountability and continuous improvement. Joining at a pivotal moment, you will help enhance governance, build trust, and strengthen our cloud and operational foundation amidst substantial personnel and capital investments. The IT organization supports a global workforce of approximately 150 people, primarily composed of software engineers and researchers. Depending on the needs of your region and the local team composition, you may operate as a primary technical point of contact for cloud projects or work collaboratively alongside peers in a shared-responsibility model.

Essential Functions:

• Design, provision, and maintain AWS cloud infrastructure and hybrid global networks-including VPCs, subnets, routing tables, Transit Gateways, firewalls, VPNs, and site-to-site connectivity-using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as the primary deployment method.
• Enhance cloud and infrastructure security through IAM policy refinement, network security groups, vulnerability remediation, patching, and system hardening.
• Monitor system health, performance, and cloud spend using AWS-native tools (CloudWatch, CloudTrail) alongside tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and SNMP.
• Participate in incident response and serve as an escalation point for complex cloud, network, and systems issues.
• Align IT and cloud services with global standards, ensuring stable, reliable, and highly available infrastructure.
• Collaborate effectively with colleagues across regions and share knowledge.
• Diagnose and resolve complex technical issues across AWS cloud services, local networks, and operating systems.

Technical Responsibilities:

• Plan, support and execute migration strategies (rehosting, replatforming, refactoring) to transition on-premises workloads into AWS.
• Deploy, configure, and maintain Linux servers and containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes) in both cloud and hybrid environments.
• Assist in the deployment and maintenance of developer tooling and CI/CD pipelines to support software engineering and research teams.
• Implement and maintain infrastructure monitoring and alerting to proactively identify performance bottlenecks and security anomalies.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree and minimum 6 years of prior relevant experience. Graduate Degree and a minimum of 4 years of prior related experience. In lieu of a degree, minimum of 10 years of prior related experience.

Preferred Additional Skills:

• Experience assisting with cloud migration projects, including moving workloads from on-premises environments to AWS.
• Production experience building, securing, and supporting AWS networks (VPCs, Transit Gateway, Route 53, Direct Connect, ELB/ALB).
• Advanced experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), specifically using Terraform to manage multi-account AWS environments.
• Hands-on experience supporting Linux operating systems, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native application stacks.
• Excellent communication and organizational abilities.
• Flexibility for occasional travel.
• Duties require working with a global team and may periodically necessitate working outside of normal working hours (evenings, holidays, and weekends).

Eligibility Criteria:

• Must be eligible for registration with the Controlled Goods Program;
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a government of Canada Reliability status and Secret Level 2/NATO Secret security clearance;
• Must be eligible to meet the requirements for U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).