Team Lead DevOps Engineering
About ANVIL
ANVIL is a trusted partner in the defence industry, delivering cutting-edge solutions that enhance military capabilities and operational effectiveness. We extend our expertise to public safety, law enforcement, and national security organizations, accelerating mission-critical decision-making through analytical tools, automations, and game-changing machine learning capabilities. ANVIL helps organizations discover, manage, enrich, fuse, and exploit the information available to them in support of Information Dominance and Decision Advantage.
Job Type: Full Time Remote (Hybrid option available for those in the Ottawa area - 55 Murray Street Office)
Total Compensation: CAD $122,500.00 - $162,500.00 base salary - Placement within range based on experience and qualifications
Vacancy Status: This posting is for an existing vacancy. Anvil is actively recruiting to fill this position.
Role (Description)
As a Team Lead DevOps Engineering, you will guide a team of senior and intermediate DevOps engineers while remaining a meaningful technical contributor to the systems you help design and operate. This is a role for someone who has developed serious depth across the DevOps and platform engineering stack and is ready to grow their impact through the people and architecture around them, not just the pipelines and infrastructure they personally build.
The majority of your time will be directed toward your team: conducting pipeline and infrastructure reviews, mentoring engineers across experience levels, upholding standards around deployment reliability, security posture, and operational repeatability, and supporting your direct reports through regular 1:1s, honest performance conversations, and deliberate career development. Your remaining time keeps you close to the technical work; contributing to architecturally significant deployment systems, shaping CI/CD strategy, informing decisions around containerization and cloud infrastructure, and ensuring your instincts stay current enough to lead with credibility.
You will work closely with backend, frontend, and platform teams to ensure deployment processes are reliable, well-documented, and designed to hold up under the demands of mission-critical, air-gapped operational environments. You will be the person your team looks to for technical direction, a clear quality bar, and the kind of candid and constructive guidance that helps them grow.
This is a full-time position based in Ottawa / Remote. Eligible candidates must either possess or be eligible to obtain a Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance.
Required Qualifications
Security Clearance
Eligible for Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance
Experience
- 8–12 years of experience in DevOps or platform engineering, with significant production-grade work in CI/CD pipeline design, containerization, and orchestration
- Demonstrated experience leading or formally mentoring other engineers, whether through a prior lead role or a consistent track record of raising the quality and capability of those around them
- Deep, hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated build and deployment pipelines across multiple delivery mechanisms (cloud, virtual machines, appliance-based), sufficient to review others' work with authority and coach engineers through complex problems
- Expert knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies including Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes, with the architectural judgment to apply each appropriately
- Experience applying DevSecOps practices: static code analysis, dependency vulnerability (CVE) scanning, and integrating security checks into CI/CD workflows
- Experience conducting pipeline and infrastructure reviews as a primary quality gate, catching defects and shaping how a team thinks about deployment reliability, repeatability, and long-term maintainability
Skills & Competencies
- A clear and considered approach to technical leadership: able to set CI/CD and infrastructure direction, communicate the reasoning behind it, and bring a team along without creating bottlenecks
- Strong coaching instincts (able to read where each engineer is, what they need to progress, and how to deliver feedback that sticks)
- Comfortable holding a high bar for operational quality, deployment reliability, and security compliance
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to represent your team's systems and technical decisions to frontend engineers, product stakeholders, and senior leadership alike
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex system and integration failures, and to use those moments as structured learning opportunities for the team
Preferred Qualifications & Competencies
- Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and experience helping a team operate effectively within sprint-based delivery cycles
- Experience working in or closely with defence, public safety, or national security organizations
- Experience with VM administration and hypervisor technologies (QEMU/KVM, VMware ESXi) and appliance-based deployment models
- Experience contributing to platform-level infrastructure decisions, including cross-team deployment standards and API governance for internal tooling
- Prior involvement in hiring processes, technical interviews, or onboarding programs for engineering teams
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Mentorship
- Manage a team of senior and intermediate DevOps engineers, serving as their primary point of support, accountability, and professional development
- Conduct regular 1:1s focused on growth, blockers, feedback, and career trajectories
- Provide honest, timely, and well-framed performance feedback; contribute to formal performance reviews and help engineers understand what meaningful progress looks like for them
- Foster a team culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist
Code Quality & Technical Standards
- Own the pipeline and infrastructure review process for your team's output, ensuring reviews are thorough, consistent, and serve as genuine learning moments rather than rubber stamps
- Define and maintain DevOps coding standards, CI/CD design conventions, deployment practices, and security expectations across the team
- Identify patterns in pipeline reliability or security issues and address them systematically
- Serve as the escalation point for complex technical decisions within your team's domain
Technical Contribution
- Contribute directly to architecturally significant pipeline systems, deployment automation, or areas of the infrastructure where your experience and judgment add the most value
- Stay close enough to the day-to-day technical work to review code with authority, support engineers through hard problems, and make well-grounded infrastructure recommendations
- Champion DevSecOps practices across the team, including security scanning integration, compliance automation, and reproducible deployment standards
Project Support & Communication
- Participate actively in sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives
- Represent your team's progress, capacity, and technical needs clearly to product and engineering leadership
- Review and provide feedback on requirements, design documents, and specifications on behalf of your team
- Work closely with cross-functional partners to maintain delivery standards without sacrificing the quality bar your team is held to
- Provide insights to enhance software provisioning, maintenance, and support procedures
Why Join Us?
Our Mission
This is more than just a job; you'll be part of a team of dedicated professionals who share a common goal: to increase the safety and security of Western democracies through the effective use of data. Our workplace is not just a job; it's a community of like-minded people working together to make a positive impact on the world we live in.
Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salaries
- Flexible health benefits package through Equitable
- Industry-leading employer retirement contributions match
Work Environment
- Hybrid work model combining remote flexibility with meaningful in-person collaboration
- Modern office in the historic Carriageway building in beautiful downtown Ottawa
- Access to downtown amenities, transit, and Ottawa's vibrant cultural scene
What You'll Experience
- Work alongside dedicated professionals who value excellence and collaboration
- Contribute to building the team behind technologies with real-world security impact
- Ground-floor opportunity to shape people operations as ANVIL scales
- Join a culture where your expertise and ideas matter
Application Process
To apply for this role, please submit your CV and cover letter. The application process will likely include:
- A preliminary call with our team, which will be a chance for you to find out more about ANVIL and the role.
- An initial interview to discuss your experience and suitability for the role.
- A practical exercise to assess your approach to common scenarios in the role.
ANVIL welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates participating in all aspects of the selection process.
Use of AI in Recruitment: ANVIL does not use artificial intelligence to screen, assess, or select applicants for this position. All applications are reviewed by members of our recruitment team.
