Application Specialist

Arobas Personnel is looking for an Application Specialist for a contract with one of our clients located in Toronto, Montreal, or Ottawa.

Remote: Hybrid - 2 days/week in the office

The 3 super-powers required:

• Super-Power 1: Proven experience in supporting Kubernetes-based platforms, with expertise in critical issue mitigation.

• Super-Power 2: Demonstrated experience in monitoring & observability (Zabbix/Dynatrace/Datadog for infrastructure monitoring and ELK stack for log aggregation, visualization, and analysis).

• Super-Power 3: Fundamental knowledge of TCP/IP Networks – ideally in a telecom environment.

What does your day to day look like?

• Deeply understands business drivers and cross-departmental impacts.
• Develops business cases to justify application-related capital investments.
• Translates business requirements into technical requirements.
• Explains complicated technical issues in a simplified way to all levels of the organization.
• Leads system requirements gathering for scalable, robust, and optimized designs.
• Provides input and direction to vendors to ensure optimal designs.
• Provides analysis and recommendations for new software/infrastructure.
• Evaluates test results to determine pass/fail status.
• Supports the project team with defect resolution during test activities.
• Develops Method of Procedure (MOP) documentation.
• Creates or approves deployment plans.
• Ensures Agile and risk-managed deployments of new code to production.
• Accountable for ensuring technical documentation (architecture diagrams, as-built design information) is in place and kept up-to-date.
• Interprets application availability metrics, taking proactive actions to achieve target results.
• Troubleshoots production issues as a 3rd-level escalation contact by supporting Operational teams.

What we’re looking for?

• Proven experience with the complete SRE stack (deployment, observability & security).
• Strong interest in building bridges with technical and non-technical teams.
• Strong desire for continuous learning and a desire to mentor and be mentored.
• Strong technical writing skills (ability to write clearly and concisely).
• Strong troubleshooting skills (ability to uncover root cause rapidly and provide resolution or workaround).
• Proven ability to meet aggressive deadlines & work under pressure with competing priorities.
• Experience with leading-edge concepts and techniques like multi-threading, high availability, virtualization, containerization, and database performance analysis tools.
• Deep knowledge of DB systems.
• Familiar with Web Services concepts.
• Performance analysis and tuning experience.

Preferred Skills / Competencies:

• Proven experience with the complete SRE stack (deployment, observability & security).
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, IT, or a related discipline.
• Operating Systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows Server 2019-2022.
• Databases: Certifications or experience with Oracle, MSSQL, SQL, data modeling.
• DevOps tooling (Gitlab CI/CD, Zabbix/Datadog/Dynatrace).
• Experience with continuous integration/delivery pipelines and automation.
• Good understanding of application/platform security concepts and best practices.
• Network (TCP/IP/Ethernet) – deep knowledge (CCNA or equivalent preferred).
• Experience or passion related to migration from on-premises deployments to cloud and transition to microservices.
• Experience with data warehousing, report generation, and ETL tools.
• Ability to develop Proof of Concepts (POCs) to verify scalability of a design.