Senior Infrastructure Specialist, West

As a self-regulatory organization, the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) is committed to setting high regulatory standards for the investment industry, safeguarding investors, and supporting the integrity of Canada’s capital markets. Join a growing team and contribute to the dynamic and complex world of Canadian capital markets.

As the markets evolve, the Infrastructure Critical Services team's operating requirements have evolved. CIRO requires an experienced Senior Infrastructure Specialist to provide Western time-zone coverage for later trading hours and to bring direct financial-markets experience to the support of mission-critical surveillance and MTRS environments.

The Senior Infrastructure Specialist, West provides technical expertise supporting CIRO’s mission-critical surveillance systems, Market Trade Reporting Systems (MTRS), and enterprise applications. As part of Infrastructure Critical Services team, this role ensures high availability, operation resilience, scalability, and performance across both infrastructure and applications layers in a modern, cloud-enabled, data driven environment.

Core Responsibilities:

Technical and Operational Support

• Provide ongoing support and maintenance for CIRO’s Surveillance and MTRS system and enterprise applications.
• Monitor system health using modern observability platforms (Zabbix, metrics, logs, traces) to ensure performance and availability.
• Manage daily operational processes including start-of-day and end-of-day activities.
• Support and optimize real-time data pipelines, including FIX protocol, streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka), and derivatives market data feeds.

Incident Management & Reliability Operations

• Acts as the primary point of contact during critical system and infrastructure incidents.
• Lead incident response using ITIL frameworks (e.g., incident management systems).
• Drive rapid triage, mitigation, and resolution across internal teams and external vendors.
• Conduct details root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventive measures.
• Leverage Zabbix monitoring to proactively detect anomalies and reduce incident frequency.

Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineering

• Participate in design and implement high availability, fault-tolerance, and scalable systems.
• Enhance reliability through.
  • Redundancy and failover strategies
  • Load balancing
  • Performance tuning and capacity planning
• Build and support cloud-based architecture using Azure services
• Contribute to infrastructure architecture and best practices.

Cloud, DevOps

• Manage and support workloads in Microsoft Azure
• Work with containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines using modern DevOps tools (e.g., Azure DevOps)

Vendor & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work closely with application teams, infrastructure teams, and third-party vendors.
• Coordinate infrastructure-related initiatives and align priorities business units.
• Act as technical advisor for critical services and operational excellence.

Disaster Recovery and Continuity Planning

• Design and execute disaster recovery (DR) strategies and failover testing.
• Partner with IT and business stakeholders to ensure recovery readiness and compliance.

Automation & Continuous Planning

• Collaborate with application development teams to improve monitoring and automation.
• Drive initiatives toward a “lights-out” operations model with minimal manual intervention.
• Develop automation scripts and automate systems.
• Continuously improve system reliability, deployment processes, and operational efficiency.

Documentation & Compliance

• Maintain comprehensive and up-to-date documentation (operation manual, architecture diagrams).
• Ensure operational readiness for audits, reviews, and regulatory compliance.
• Knowledge sharing and best practices across teams

Key Skills and Competencies:

Must-haves

Technical Expertise

• 5+ years of experience supporting infrastructure and production environments within capital markets, financial services, or trading organizations.
• Strong, demonstrable understanding of capital markets platforms, trading workflows, and financial messaging protocols such as FIX and SAIL.
• Extensive knowledge of enterprise infrastructure technologies, including servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and middleware components.
• Proven experience supporting mission-critical Linux and Windows environments with a focus on stability, availability, and incident management.
• Familiarity with Azure Cloud technologies and infrastructure automation tools.
• Working knowledge of scripting and automation using Python, PowerShell, or Bash to support operational efficiency and platform reliability.
• Experience collaborating with application, network, and business teams to support trading, market data, and post-trade systems.

Operational Excellence

• Ability to manage and prioritize multiple tasks in high-pressure environments.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Commitment to resolving issues thoroughly and efficiently.
• Experience in regulated financial environments.

Collaboration & Communication

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Ability to work undependably and effectively with cross-functional teams and external vendors.

Continuous improvement Mindset

• Proactive approach to identifying and mitigating risks.
• Dedication to learning and staying current with emerging technologies.
• Strong focus on process improvement and operational efficiencies.

What we offer

• Competitive total rewards program including performance-based bonus *
• Hybrid work environment
• Employer paid Health Benefits and Spending Account that offer flexibility to meet your individual or family needs as of day one*
• Defined Contribution Pension Plan with company matching that starts on your first day of employment*
• Paid flex days and wellness days*
• Maternity and Parental Leave top up *
• Paid continuous learning and continuing development including designations*

*Offerings are not applicable to contracts

Culture and Working Environment

Life at CIRO is purpose and performance - driven. We foster an inclusive culture where teamwork, a forward-thinking attitude, and integrity are at the core of everything we do. This creates an environment where employees thrive, grow, and are empowered to learn and contribute their best work.

Joining CIRO means becoming part of a dynamic and transparent organization that values accountability and is committed to maintaining the highest standards of regulatory oversight in the financial industry.

Our Commitment

CIRO is committed to creating an inclusive and barrier-free recruitment and selection process. We welcome applications from all qualified individuals and will provide accommodation upon request for candidates participating in all aspects of the recruitment process, in accordance with applicable human rights and accessibility legislation. If you require accommodation, please contact Human Resources.

CIRO is a pan-Canadian organization that oversees all investment dealers and trading activity in marketplaces across Canada. This position requires regular communication and collaboration with employees in CIRO regional offices and with stakeholders across Canada. Proficiency in English is required due to the frequent interactions with internal and external English-speaking members, clients, registered representatives, firms, Canadian provincial and territorial securities regulators, and employees located outside Quebec. For positions based in Quebec, proficiency in both English and French is required to effectively perform the duties of the role and communicate with stakeholders in both official languages.

Additional Information

• This posting reflects an active vacancy on our team
• We use automated (AI) enabled technology to support aspects of candidate sourcing, screening, and communications. Applications are reviewed by our hiring team and hiring decisions are made by people.
• The hiring range for this position is $92,500 - $112,500. The final compensation offered will be based on the successful candidate’s knowledge, skills, education, training, experience, internal equity, and external market considerations.

We thank all applicants for their interest; however, only those selected for further consideration will be contacted.

#hiring