Secure System Platform Engineer

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.

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.

Pre Requirements:

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

1. Must be either a Canadian Citizen or Canadian Permanent Resident

2. 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 

3. 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 escalate to.

• 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.

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business. 

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Must have the ability to work in Canada without sponsorship.

This role will involve working with technology that is covered by Export Regulations sanctions. If you are a Foreign National from any of the following US sanctioned countries (Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia regions of Ukraine) on a work permit, you are not eligible for employment in this position.