Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer

Location: Calgary, AB — Hybrid (3 days/wk)

(Yes, our job postings are intentionally longer than others. Though they will provide you with a realistic job preview and guidance on how best to present your application. We suggest reading in full.)

About SOVRA

SOVRA is a leading public procurement platform trusted by more than 7,000 government agencies and over 1 million suppliers across North America. Our work sits at the intersection of technology, public service, and accountability, helping governments operate more efficiently and transparently on behalf of the communities they serve.

What makes SOVRA unique is our deep focus on the public sector. Our solutions are purpose-built to solve real, complex procurement challenges, balancing compliance with usability and innovation. That commitment has been recognized with the Achievement of Excellence in Procurement (AEP) Certification from the National Procurement Institute, reflecting our high standards and impact on the market.

At SOVRA, the work you do matters. Every improvement we make helps public organizations stretch taxpayer dollars further, operate with greater transparency, and deliver better outcomes for millions of people. We're a growing, mission-driven company where smart, curious people come together to build technology that serves the public good.

Learn more at sovra.com.

About the job

SOVRA is adding a Senior DevOps Engineer to support the engineering team responsible for its public sector platform. This role was created to meet the operational demands of a growing cloud infrastructure and an AI-driven development workflow that requires a disciplined, security-minded engineer to own the platform layer end to end.

The role generates designs, automation, and day-to-day operation of SOVRA’s AWS infrastructure, Github Actions CI/CD pipelines, and observability stack. The person in this role participates in sprint cadences alongside development and data engineering teams, contributes to security hardening beyond access controls, evaluates AI-assisted DevOps tooling critically, and takes part in a 24/7 on-call rotation after onboarding.

The work requires someone who brings strong ownership across cloud infrastructure, security, and reliability practices, and who can move from strategic decisions to operational detail without losing rigor on either end. Public sector workloads carry a high standard for availability and audit readiness, and this role is accountable for holding that standard in everything it ships.

What will your main responsibilities look like?

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• You design, implement, and maintain scalable, secure, and resilient frameworks within AWS infrastructure (EC2, VPC, IAM, Route 53, RDS, S3, CloudWatch) using Terraform and configuration management tooling to keep environments consistent across dev, staging, and production.

CI/CD & Developer Enablement

• You design and manage CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions that support secure, reliable, and frequent software delivery for an AI-driven development team, participating in sprint ceremonies as a platform contributor.

• You evaluate AI-assisted deployment tooling where the output can be validated and the risk is understood.

Security & Compliance

• You implement and maintain cloud security practices across infrastructure, identity, networking, and deployment workflows. Going well beyond permissions to address the full surface.

• You collaborate with security teams on vulnerability management, secrets management, OIDC-based authentication, and compliance automation, and you support audit readiness and disaster recovery planning.

• You contribute to the evaluation of AI-assisted SIEM and SOAR capabilities where appropriate, applying the same output-validation discipline you bring to all AI tooling.

Observability, Reliability & AI Operations

• You develop and maintain monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance management capabilities, using observability platforms to identify and resolve complex issues across distributed systems.

• You participate in incident management, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews, and you contribute to a 24/7 on-call rotation after onboarding.

• You apply AI-powered operational tooling to improve anomaly detection, incident correlation, and response automation, validating outputs and recognizing model limitations before acting on them.

• You identify automation opportunities using scripting and AI tooling to reduce operational toil and increase deployment velocity.

What will you bring to this role?

DevOps and cloud engineering track record — you have 5+ years in DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or SRE

AWS and Infrastructure as Code depth — you have 3+ years of hands-on AWS experience across core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, Route 53, RDS, S3, CloudWatch) and proven experience building infrastructure with Terraform and configuration management tooling.

CI/CD pipeline ownership — you have demonstrated end-to-end ownership of GitHub Actions or a comparable CI/CD platform, including pipeline design, deployment automation, and integration with security and quality gates.

Security practices — you bring working knowledge of cloud security fundamentals (IAM, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, OIDC federation) and you approach security as a layer that runs through infrastructure, pipelines, and deployment workflows, not just permissions.

Observability and monitoring experience— you have experience with enterprise observability platforms such as Datadog, ELK/OpenSearch, or equivalent

Scripting experience - strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or a comparable language

AI-assisted tooling fluency — you have experience working with AI development or operations agents, and you bring the engineering maturity to evaluate how they integrate into infrastructure as well as how to build infrastructure for AI enablement

Authorization to work in Canada — we are not able to sponsor work visas or transfers at this time

What are the assets that would make you stand out?

SIEM/SOAR and security monitoring familiarity — you have exposure to SIEM or SOAR platforms and an interest in how AI-enhanced security monitoring is developing in the industry.

AIOps and MLOps experience — you are familiar with AIOps or MLOps concepts and tooling (such as MLflow, SageMaker, or Bedrock) and you understand the operational needs of AI-enabled applications including model deployment, drift monitoring, and inference infrastructure.

SaaS or govtech environment experience — you have worked in a SaaS or government technology environment where audit readiness, uptime commitments, and compliance requirements shaped how infrastructure was designed and operated.

You should apply if

• You want genuine ownership of a cloud platform, not ticket driven work, where the decisions you make on infrastructure, security, and reliability have direct and visible consequences on production.

• You are drawn to an environment where AI tooling is central to how the development team works, and where your value lies in knowing when to trust it, when to question it, and how to build guardrails around it.

• You find the discipline of DevSecOps, security embedded across the stack, not bolted on at the end, to be the right way to build, not an additional burden.

• You want to work on technology that serves the public sector, where the reliability and integrity of what you operate matters to the government agencies that depend on it.

What we look for in applications

We review every application individually and assess it on its own merits rather than screening for keywords. The most remarkable applications are specific:

• Specific detail about your own work tells us far more than a summary of responsibilities

• Describe the infrastructure or systems you built or operated, the scale and constraints involved, and the outcome, with numbers wherever you have them.

• A technology list alone tells us very little – show where you used it and in what context

Interview process

Our process is designed to be thorough while respecting your time. Two rounds:

1. Screening with Talent Acquisition

2. Hiring Manager, Technical Interview , and Team Interview

Why you should join us

SOVRA serves the public sector, and the work carries the weight that comes with that purpose. Every improvement to our platform helps government agencies operate more efficiently and deliver greater value to the communities they serve. We are a company in a period of deliberate growth, and we are looking for professionals who want genuine ownership of their work and a direct hand in building the organization around them. In this role, that ownership is real: your work on SOVRA’s cloud platform directly shapes the reliability, security, and delivery velocity of technology used by thousands of public sector organizations across North America.

• Our benefits include the following, with full details shared during the hiring process:

• Comprehensive health and medical coverage.

• Paid time off.

• A structured learning and development program.

• Paid parental leave.

At SOVRA, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace. We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We provide a work environment free from discrimination and harassment. In addition, we are committed to ensuring pay equity across our organization and regularly review our compensation practices.