Senior Specialist, Cybersecurity

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Job Type:

Employee

Duration in Months (for fixed-term jobs):

24

Job Family:

Research and Program Support

# of Open Positions:

1

Faculty/Service - Department:

EECS_PM

Campus:

Main Campus

Union Affiliation:

N/A

Date Posted:

June 26, 2025

Applications must be received BEFORE:

July 07, 2025

Hours per week:

35

Salary Grade:

Non-Union Grade NC8 - 35 hrs

Salary Range:

$94,214.00 - $117,768.00

About the Faculty of Engineering
The Faculty of Engineering strives to provide a learning environment that promotes excellence and innovation, ethical practice and responsibility towards society. Our workplace will challenge, energize and motivate you to be your very best while providing opportunities for career growth and professional development. Our work makes a world of difference in the lives of our students, who will become the next generation of leaders and change makers of our society. Our dynamic community is dedicated to building innovations that will not only help the advancement of technology, but solutions that will revolutionize the industry. We look forward to making the future TOGETHER!

*We operate in a hybrid environment, with three days per week on campus. 

Position purpose:

Supports the Director by providing long-term strategic planning in the design, development and implementation of all cybersecurity solutions for the uOttawa Cyber Range offering. Creates, implements, and delivers immersive cybersecurity scenarios for a variety of complex systems for users, both internal and external.

The uOttawa-IBM Cyber Range is a unique learning, training and research facility that allows students, researchers and companies to work in a realistic and immersive environment to learn how to protect against cybersecurity threats.     

In this role, your responsibilities will include:

Security Risk Management: Creates and implements security protocols and best practices to fortify the Cyber Range’s offering. This includes building realistic training scenarios based on known and newly identified TTPs. Builds and maintains complex realistic simulation of large, virtualized networks on both CITEF and Field Effect.

Risk Analysis and Mitigation: Assesses potential risks and develops strategies to mitigate risks for the Cyber Range offering. Analyzes real-world kill chains to discover new TTPs and gaps in coverage. Evaluates the impact of different threats and devises plans to counteract them. Builds & maintains playbooks on threat actor TTPs, and integrates these playbooks into the immersive scenarios

Business Development: With the objective of generating revenue for the Cyber Range, establishes and expands relationships with new and existing partners. Drives new business by generating and qualifying leads through sales support and content delivery.

Monitoring Systems: Masters monitoring networks and systems for potential security breaches or suspicious activities. This involves analyzing logs and reports generated by security tools to detect anomalies. Measures and tunes TTP coverage through data mining, customer telemetry & internal sandbox feeds. Integrates the findings into the immersive scenarios.

Expert Advice: Provides professional expertise to clients and leads the analysis of functional requirements for projects within the state-of-the-art Cyber Range. Determines technical and operational requirements. 

Design: Provides leadership in the creation of technical designs and system specifications or plans in order to translate requirements into technical specification documents.

Deployment and Maintenance: Prepares complete hands-on labs for a variety of cybersecurity topics/use cases, leveraging on a modern cyber range infrastructure.

Project Management: Provides guidance and leadership to project teams and establishes project steps, milestones and timetables including analyzing and estimating feasibility, costs, time and compatibility with hardware and other programs in order to ensure completion within the established timeframe and budget while maximizing the use of the unit’s resources.

Continuous Improvement and Trends: Promotes a culture of innovation; identifies and implements state-of-the-art security tools and techniques which will adapt to changes in the cyber threat landscape and technological advancements. Provides subject matter expertise to the Cyber Range team based on industry attack trends and product capabilities.

What you will bring:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field

Minimum 5 years of relevant professional experience such as cybersecurity, virtualization and/or other specialized areas in Computer Science.

Ability to identify opportunities, develop solutions, and overcome challenges. 

Specialization or working experience in at least one of the following domains:

• Cybersecurity systems: penetration testing, forensics investigation, malware analysis
• Development: infrastructure as code, virtualization, advanced scripting and miscellaneous development

Ability in providing feedback to project teams in non-technical terms and to communicate technical concepts to users

Understanding and deep knowledge of commonly used attack tools and frameworks used by Red team

Security Operations Center (SOC) or blue team experience involving the hunting and discovery of adversaries in enterprise environments

Experience with a background in the modern attacker kill-chain, MITRE ATT&CK, and emerging enterprise threats including attacks against AI systems.

Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Python or JavaScript

Proficiency in virtualization and containerization technologies

Experience with Ansible

Expert Linux user

Knowledge of industry standards and best practice.

Excellent analytical, collaboration and facilitation skills

Proven abilities in building partnerships and/or collaborative working relationships with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders. knowledge of project management concepts and methods

Bilingualism – French and English (spoken and written)

#LI-Hybrid

Key Competencies at uOttawa:
Here are the required competencies for all or our employees at uOttawa: 

Planning: Organize in time a series of actions or events in order to realize an objective or a project. Plan and organize own work and priorities in regular daily activities.
Initiative: Demonstrate creativity and initiative to suggest improvements and encourage positive results. Is proactive and self-starting. Show availability and willingness to go above and beyond whenever it is possible.
Client Service Orientation: Help or serve others to meet their needs. This implies anticipating and identifying the needs of internal and external clients and finding solutions on how to meet them.
Teamwork and Cooperation: Cooperate and work well with other members of the team to reach common goal(s). Accept and give constructive feedback. Able to adjust own behaviour to reach the goals of the team.

The University of Ottawa embraces diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We are passionate about our people and committed to employment equity. We foster a culture of respect, teamwork and inclusion, where collaboration, innovation, and creativity fuel our quest for research and teaching excellence. While all qualified persons are invited to apply, we welcome applications from qualified Indigenous persons, racialized persons, persons with disabilities, women and LGBTQIA2S+ persons. The University is committed to creating and maintaining an accessible, barrier-free work environment. The University is also committed to working with applicants with disabilities requesting accommodation during the recruitment, assessment and selection processes. Applicants with disabilities may contact hrtalentmanagement@uottawa.ca to communicate the accommodation need. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

Note: if this is a union position: The hiring process will be governed by the current collective agreement related to the union affiliation noted above; you can click here to find out more.

If this is a front-line position with responsibilities to interact with students, selected candidates must be rated at the Low Advanced proficiency level or higher for both oral comprehension and reading comprehension in their second official language. The rating is determined by a proficiency test designed by the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.

Prior to May 1, 2022, the University required all students, faculty, staff, and visitors (including contractors) to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as defined in Policy 129 – Covid-19 Vaccination. This policy was suspended effective May 1, 2022 but may be reinstated at any point in the future depending on public health guidelines and the recommendations of experts.