Sr. Specialist, SRE – Compute Platforms

Canadian Tire Corporation; Toronto; On-site; CAD 64,000 - 106,000; Full time

Job summary

Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) seeks a Sr. Specialist, SRE – Compute Platforms to own enterprise compute platforms (z/OS, AIX, IBM iSeries, IBM NOI, New Relic) and ensure reliability across the estate.

As governance lead, you will drive lifecycle strategy, observability standards, vendor accountability, and incident response, partnering with MSPs to deliver resilient services from Toronto or Calgary in a hybrid setup.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in platform ownership or enterprise technology leadership.
• Strong governance across enterprise compute platforms and lifecycles.
• Experience with MSP/vendor-managed support models and service governance.
• Proven ability to translate technical risk into business impact.

Responsibilities

• Provide governance and oversight of Mainframe services, OS lifecycle, and infrastructure roadmap.
• Assess versions and risks; develop renewal and modernization strategies.
• Lead platform lifecycle governance including hardware refresh planning.
• Define monitoring and observability requirements for Mainframe services.
• Oversee disaster recovery readiness and testing.
• Provide technical leadership during major incidents and problem investigations.
• Establish monitoring standards and escalation models for service health.
• Drive observability maturity and service visibility across environments.
• Review vendor performance against contracts and SLAs.
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives for reliability and governance.
• Support audits and compliance activities related to backup and recovery.
• Lead continuous service maturity initiatives.

Skills

Platform ownership

SRE leadership

Vendor governance

Observability

Disaster recovery

Incident management

Communication

Tools

z/OS

AIX

IBM iSeries

New Relic

ITIL

ServiceNow

Splunk

Job description

Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) is seeking a Sr. Specialist, SRE – Compute Platforms to serve as the enterprise technical owner for CTC's compute platforms, including IBM Mainframe (z/OS), AIX, IBM iSeries, IBM NOI, New Relic, and associated business-critical services and applications.

This role is accountable for platform governance, service ownership, lifecycle strategy, observability governance, vendor oversight, and reliability outcomes across the compute environment. Operational execution is performed by HCL/Harmony and other designated support providers. The Sr. Specialist provides governance, strategic direction, technical leadership, and vendor accountability.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide governance and oversight of HCL/Harmony-delivered Mainframe services, including z/OS lifecycle planning, platform currency, capacity strategy, LPAR governance, and infrastructure roadmap planning
• Assess platform, OS, middleware, and application versions; identify lifecycle, supportability, security, and compliance risks; develop renewal and modernization strategies
• Lead platform lifecycle governance activities including hardware refresh planning, OS upgrade strategy, maintenance governance, and long-term roadmap alignment
• Define, govern, and periodically review monitoring and observability requirements for Mainframe infrastructure and business-critical services
• Provide governance and oversight of disaster recovery readiness, resiliency planning, recovery testing, and recovery capability validation
• Provide technical leadership and governance during major incidents, problem investigations, and corrective action planning
• Establish governance standards for monitoring coverage, alerting requirements, event correlation, escalation models, and service health dashboards
• Drive continuous improvement of observability maturity, service visibility, monitoring effectiveness, and operational intelligence
• Validate vendor-delivered services against contractual obligations, SOW commitments, service level expectations, and governance requirements
• Lead vendor performance reviews, operational scorecards, service reporting reviews, and continuous improvement initiatives
• Support audit, compliance, and control activities related to backup, recovery, disaster recovery, monitoring controls, and infrastructure lifecycle management
• Lead continuous improvement initiatives focused on service maturity, reliability, observability, sustainability, risk reduction, and operational excellence

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in platform ownership, infrastructure governance, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), service management, or enterprise technology leadership
• Strong background in Mainframe platform governance, including z/OS environments, lifecycle planning, capacity management, and vendor-managed support models
• Experience governing enterprise monitoring, observability, event management, or operational intelligence practices across large-scale technology environments
• Knowledge of AIX, IBM iSeries, enterprise middleware, and application hosting environments supporting business-critical workloads
• Experience governing enterprise storage and backup services, including capacity planning, recovery validation, and resiliency requirements
• Experience supporting disaster recovery governance, DR exercises, recovery reporting, remediation tracking, and resiliency planning
• Experience working within MSP-governed or vendor-managed service environments
• Strong understanding of incident, problem, change, lifecycle, operational risk, vendor governance, and service management processes
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical escalations and hold vendors accountable to service expectations
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate technical risk into clear operational and business impact

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting IBM Mainframe environments, including z/OS, middleware, enterprise schedulers, and file transfer platforms
• Experience with observability and monitoring platforms such as IBM OMEGAMON, ITM/Tivoli, Netcool, New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk, Elastic, ThousandEyes, or equivalent
• Familiarity with ServiceNow-based incident, event, problem, change, risk, vendor, and lifecycle management workflows
• Experience governing infrastructure refreshes, hardware lifecycle initiatives, maintenance planning, and data centre change activities
• Experience working with outsourced infrastructure providers including SOW governance, SLA management, and contract oversight

Location: Toronto, Ontario OR Calgary, Alberta (Hybrid: In-office 4 days a week)

Salary Range: $64,000 – $106,000 annually (typical hiring range: $64,000 – $85,000)