Senior DevOps Specialist

Join the Cyber-DNS team at CIRA and play a key role in advancing Canada’s cybersecurity and DNS infrastructure! Our Cyber-DNS team is dedicated to protecting Canadians online by delivering cutting-edge solutions.

You’ll tackle projects that make a real difference—including empowering users with CIRA Cybersecurity Awareness Training, securing household and enterprise networks through CIRA Canadian Shield and DNS Firewall, or defending against DDoS attacks with Anycast DNS. This is your chance to be part of a team that’s shaping the future of digital security and DNS technology, making a meaningful difference in how Canadians and global citizens alike experience and trust the internet! 

Who you are: 

You care about the internet as public infrastructure, not just something you use, but something that shapes how people live, work and connect. You understand its role in supporting knowledge-sharing, commerce and community, and you want to help strengthen and evolve it.

Over the past decade, you’ve built hands-on experience with the technologies that power the internet. You have focused on cloud environments and are comfortable working across the AWS ecosystem. You use tools like Terraform, Ansible and Git to provision and manage infrastructure, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs and IAM policies.

You’re eager to collaborate with the pioneers who designed today’s protocols and the engineers continuing to evolve them. With curiosity, expertise, and drive, you’re ready to contribute to the next chapter of the Internet’s story.

What you’ll do:

Contribute to the design, operation and reliability of critical DNS infrastructure, supporting services such as CIRA DNS Firewall, CIRA Canadian Shield and authoritative Anycast platforms that protect millions of users and domains.

Manage large-scale fleets of physical and virtual servers around the world. Implement automation for provisioning, patching, scaling, and decommissioning. Ensure consistency and compliance of OS, software, security, and configurations.

Write infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar) for repeatable deployments of a mix of infrastructure (bare metal, ec2s/vms, and serverless) both in the cloud and in data centres. Identify opportunities for automation and design solutions that boost predictability and delivery speed.

Build and operate monitoring, logging and alerting systems to support real-time visibility. Respond to incidents, troubleshoot across the stack and contribute to root cause analysis and continuous improvement through blameless postmortems.

Share knowledge with peers through code reviews, documentation and collaborative development practices.

Implement CI/CD approaches to support reliable, automated changes across environments and services.

Design and operate systems that meet defined service levels. Support capacity planning, scaling strategies and disaster recovery testing.

Work with security and development teams to meet compliance requirements for regulated environments.

Create and maintain clear technical documentation for infrastructure and processes.

Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

What you bring:

10+ years of experience applying DevOps principles in production environments.

Strong Linux administration skills, including system installation, operations and hardening.

Deep understanding of TCP/IP networking, with working knowledge of BGP and anycast routing.

Advanced experience with automation and CI/CD tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, Git).

Experience working within structured change and incident management practices, ideally in an ISO 27001 environment.

Familiarity with public key cryptography and protocols such as TLS, SSH and DNSSEC.

Ability to work collaboratively with colleagues and partners to achieve shared outcomes.

AWS certifications ( Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) are an asset.

Additional experience with routing protocols is an asset.

Who we are:    

At CIRA, we’re driven by a passion to make a positive impact on Canada’s digital future. We’re not just asking, ‘What more can we do?’—we’re actively exploring new frontiers to enhance and secure the internet for all Canadians. Our recognition as one of the National Capital Region’s Top Employers for ten years is a testament to our vibrant culture. We believe in fostering an environment where collaboration and candour are second nature and where diverse perspectives are integral to our success, because we know that great ideas come from everywhere. If you’re passionate about innovation and ready to make a difference in a dynamic field, join us and help shape the future of the internet!

CIRA embraces a blend of remote and IRL in-office work to keep our team connected and engaged. Our Ottawa headquarters is a hub for regular events and social activities that bring our team together, encouraging a strong sense of community within our organization. No matter where you work from, you'll always feel part of our vibrant team and our shared mission.

At CIRA, people remain at the centre of our recruitment process. While CIRA uses recruitment platforms that include artificial intelligence-enabled features, which may be used to support administrative processes or skills-based assessments, these features are intended to assist our recruitment activities and do not replace human judgment. All applicant screenings, interviews, evaluations and selection decisions are conducted by our staff. Artificial intelligence is not used to make autonomous or final hiring decisions.

This posting is for an existing vacancy. For any accommodations during the recruitment process, please contact us at [email protected]