Secure System Platform Engineer

International Business Machines Corporation; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Consulting in Ottawa is seeking experienced engineers to build and operate air-gapped environments on OpenShift/OpenShift-compatible platforms. The role focuses on automating environments, secure data handling, and offline software delivery with rigorous security controls.

Candidates will manage CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and observability while ensuring compliance with Canadian security requirements and ITAR data handling. On-site location in Ottawa is required.

Qualifications

• Must be eligible for Government of Canada security clearances (Secret, NATO, CGP).
• Canadian citizenship or permanent residency; 10+ years of residence in Canada with minimal out-of-country travel.
• Role is onsite in Ottawa, Ontario.

Responsibilities

• Build, test and maintain development, test and acceptance environments provisioned from code.
• Manage DMZ transfer path, internal registries, mirrors and dependencies with no internet access.
• Package and release product for delivery to clients and run CI/CD pipelines with security scanning.
• Operate observability stack to give developers and verifiers visibility for debugging.
• Provide workstation support and ensure security infrastructure (networks, firewalls, secrets, certificates).
• Administer information system procedures: patching, backups, logging and monthly security reporting.
• Operate AI model serving on air-gapped GPU servers and build safe integrations.

Skills

Linux admin

Bash scripting

Python scripting

Infrastructure as code

Ansible

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Security engineering

Networking basics

Documentation

Education

Master's Degree

Tools

OpenShift

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You'll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you'll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is built on long-term client relationships and close collaboration worldwide. You'll work with leading companies across industries, helping them shape their hybrid cloud and AI journeys. With support from our strategic partners, robust IBM technology, and Red Hat, you'll have the tools to drive meaningful change and accelerate client impact. At IBM Consulting, curiosity fuels success. You'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, explore new ideas, and create innovative solutions that deliver real results. Our culture of growth and empathy focuses on your long-term career development while valuing your unique skills and experiences.

Your Role And Responsibilities

We build a product that is installed on our clients' platforms, and we replicate their environments here in order to develop and test it.

The estate is on-premises and mostly air-gapped. There is no public cloud. A DMZ is the only way in: software, patches, container images and dependencies are downloaded there, scanned, then physically carried across into the enclave. Everything the project depends on - registries, repositories, package mirrors, scanners, identity, secrets, logging - is self-hosted and has to keep working with no internet or external access.

The target architecture is to automate everything and to run on OpenShift. OpenShift is where we are going, not where we are today, so expect to build it as well as run it. Client acceptance testing runs on native Windows. Work inside the enclave involves protectively marked material and the handling procedures that come with it.

Preferred Education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

Government of Canada Security Clearance is a requirement for this role. You must be eligible to obtain Secret, NATO and Controlled Goods Clearances

• Must be either a Canadian Citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident
• Must have resided in Canada for a minimum of 10 consecutive years, without leaving Canada (for any reason) for more than 30 days at a time OR traveling abroad to any non-NATO countries for any period
• Must have a clean criminal and credit history

This role involves examination, possession or transfer of controlled goods and technology as defined under the Canadian Controlled Goods Program and ITAR data/technology. To be eligible for employment in this role, you must be a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident. Canadian citizens and permanent residents must be security assessed under the Canadian controlled goods program. If you hold dual or third nationality, in addition to being either a Canadian citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident the nationality must be from one of the following countries in order to be eligible for employment in this role: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, United States of America. All applicants will also be required to undergo an additional security assessment conducted by an IBM designated Controlled Goods Program official as a condition of employment.

This role is onsite in Ottawa, Ontario only.

Day To Day

• Build and maintain the development, test and acceptance environments the project runs on, provisioned from code.
• Run the DMZ transfer path: bring software, patches, images and dependencies in, keep the internal registries and mirrors current, and manage, monitor and track what goes back out.
• Package and release the product for delivery to clients.
• Build and run CI/CD pipelines with security scanning in the path, and support the verification team with isolated, resettable test environments.
• Run the observability stack, and give developers and verifiers the visibility to debug their own work.
• Support developers and testers with their workstations and with the tools they need to do their work.
• Provision and operate the security infrastructure: networks and firewalls, identity, secrets and certificates, hardening and vulnerability management.
• Administer the information system to procedure - patching, accounts, backups and recovery testing, media registry and labelling, transfer logs and monthly security reporting.
• Operate AI model serving on air-gapped GPU servers, and build agents and tool integrations that are safe to run.

Requirements

• Linux administration, hardening and troubleshooting, with scripting in Bash and Python.
• Infrastructure as code as a discipline. You have built and maintained automated provisioning and configuration as reviewed, version-controlled code (Ansible, Terraform or equivalent) - not just run someone else's.
• Building and operating CI/CD pipelines with automated security scanning and controlled promotion between environments, including the artefact registries and code repositories behind them.
• Kubernetes or OpenShift operations: deployment, upgrade, networking, storage, access control and troubleshooting.
• Monitoring, logging and alerting. You have stood up an observability stack and acted on what it told you.
• Applied security engineering: identity and access, secrets and certificate management, and vulnerability scanning and remediation.
• Networking fundamentals with hands-on provisioning experience - firewalls, load balancers, DNS, routing and segmentation.
• Working to procedure and producing evidence. You are comfortable with recurring administrative duties done to a documented standard, records kept accurately and change managed formally - alongside the self-sufficiency to work without a specialist to escalation to.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• Operating disconnected, offline or otherwise internet-restricted environments and software supply chains.
• Windows Server administration and automation, particularly offline patching, unattended builds and group policy.
• Working somewhere that handles protectively marked material, with media control, transfer logging and destruction procedures.
• Formal transfer processes between security zones.
• Working towards a compliance or accreditation deadline.
• Deploying AI models or agent-based systems on self-hosted infrastructure.
• Using AI and agentic AI to help automate and document the supporting systems.
• Thin client or virtual desktop infrastructure.