AppOps, Senior Specialist (Release/Deployment)

AppOps, Senior Specialist (Release/Deployment)

At Interac, we design and deliver products and solutions that give Canadians control over their money so they can get more out of life. But that’s not all. Whether we’re leading real-time money movement, driving innovative commerce solutions like open payments for transit systems, or making advancements in new areas like verification and open banking, we are playing a key role in shaping the future of the digital economy in Canada.

Want to make a lasting impact amongst a community of creative thinkers, problem solvers, technical virtuosos, and high-performance application experts influencing the development, testing and production readiness of Canada’s next generation payments systems – Real Time Rail? If so, we want to hear from you!

Reporting to the Leader, AppOps RTR the AppOps Senior Specialist will be a hands-on application lead with advanced expertise in Site Reliability engineering and Enterprise Application Integration.

You will drive application and platform insights and work closely with technical teams to deliver and maintain cutting edge payment solutions to our customers.

You will be responsible for developing, enhancing, tuning and supporting Interac’s high performance payment systems You will proactively diagnose, resolve, and mitigate application problems and ensure optimal performance and availability of National payment systems.

You will lead, enhance and implement robust and repeatable application deployments through all environments, implementing touchless automation and driving proactive observability, detection, and self-healing capabilities. You will respond to and action escalated critical alerts and mitigate against any service and client impact.

You will actively maintain end-end Production stability and ensure adherence with Prominent Payment system (PPS) standards for Canadian payment systems.

You’ll be responsible for:  

• Leading, implementing and automating application deployments end to end across all environments (UAT, Production etc.)
• Perform hands-on configuration and troubleshooting of components including maintenance, upgrades and proactive intervention ensuring high availability and stability of the service.
• Developing detailed release / implementation and technical documentation and ensure compliance with audit and security policies/controls.
• Work closely with Product, Development, Testing, QA and Operations teams to ensure final release / code  version performance and stability prior to deployments.
• Manage and mitigate risks and resolve issues that affect release scope, schedule, and quality ensuring zero client and service impact for all release and deployments
• Represent the Release and deployment through TCAB, ExCAB and lead post implementation reviews with Agile squads, ensuring continuous enhancements of the release and deployment process.
• Implementing release and deployments related best practices and drive continuous improvements and efficiencies to the deployment pipelines.
• Driving, implementing and prioritizing application stability and service automation / optimization initiatives ensuring adherence and compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and customer journey metrics.
• Optimizing application performance and leveraging performance data, monitoring / diagnostic tools to continuously drive service excellence..
• Developing and implementing scalable solutions to reduce manual intervention, and streamline the process for application deployments/validations and availability (self-healing, auto-scaling, etc.)
• Optimize the application build, development and testing by integrating and streamlining all aspects of Application Operations.
• Responding to and quickly resolving escalated issues, 24/7 rotating on call production support and proactively mitigating risk and impact to production systems
• Coordination of all change activities acting as an “SI” within the Tech Operator role across infrastructure, platform and application as well as 3rd Party providers
• Oversight into the quality process of release procedures from all workstreams (infrastructure, platform, application) across all environments (Non-Prod, Pre-Prod, Production)
• Coordination of a release plan calendar across all workstreams / stakeholders or users of environments
• Participate in technology currency and capacity planning and additionally, as appropriate other ITIL related activities
• Providing metrics on effectiveness of release process, reporting to operational governance and coordination of recommendations for optimization where feasible

You bring:  

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or related field.
• You have expertise in using version control systems, such as Git, for managing codebases and collaboration.
• You have expertise with Red Hat Open Shift and PostgreSQL databases.
• You have expertise with CI/CD Automation and Kubernetes / containerization (e.g. docker).
• You have expertise with scripting e.g. Power Shell, Python, and Ansible.
• You have experience with Monitoring, logging and tools such as Azure Monitor, Splunk, Dynatrace etc.
• You have a thorough understanding of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.
• You have strong knowledge of Agile development and Agile frameworks (e.g. JIRA, GitHub)
• You have a strong background in build integration, testing and automation strategies.
• You have a strong understanding of SDLC including release planning, release processes, software testing, deployment implementation and maintenance/support.
• You have a good understanding of different types of open-source packages, preferably Spring, Apache and data transformation (JSON, XML).
• You are well versed in analyzing data, identifying and proactively mitigating risk to production systems.
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills and can seamlessly communicate with internal and external stakeholders.
• You are a strong and energetic team player and can engage with all stakeholders in a team environment.
• Strong structured approach in ITIL practices.

Nice to Have:

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Certification
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (or similar across AWS, GCP, etc.)
• Experience with supporting/maintaining and migrating to AWS services.
• Experience working in Agile squads.
• Experience working with OpenShift
• Experience working in the Financial and Payments services.
• ITIL Certification

How we work

We know that exceptional people have great ideas and are passionate about their work. Our culture encourages excellence and actively rewards contributions with:

• Connection: You’re surrounded by talented people every day who are driven by their passion of a common goal.
• Core Values: They define us. Living them helps us be the best at what we do.
• Compensation & Benefits: Pay is driven by individual and corporate performance, and we provide a multitude of benefits and perks.
• Education: To ensure you are the best at what you do we invest in you.

Interac requires employees to complete a background check that is completed by one of our service providers.  We use this service to complete the following checks:

• Canadian criminal record check;
• Public safety verification;
• Canadian ID cross-check;
• 5-year employment verification;
• Education verification; and
• If applicable, Credit Inquiry and Social Media Check

How we work
We know that exceptional people have great ideas and are passionate about their work.  Our culture encourages excellence and actively rewards contributions with:
Connection: You’re surrounded by talented people every day who are driven by their passion of a common goal.
Core Values:  They define us. Living them helps us be the best at what we do.
Compensation & Benefits: Pay is driven by individual and corporate performance and we provide a multitude of benefits and perks.
Education: To ensure you are the best at what you do we invest in you