Azure Specialist

Our organization

The Alberta Securities Commission (ASC) is the industry-funded regulator responsible for administering the province's securities laws. It is entrusted with fostering a fair and efficient capital market in Alberta and with protecting investors. As a member of the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), the ASC works to improve, coordinate and harmonize the regulation of Canada's capital markets.

The Information Technology (IT) team is responsible for making sure that the ASC has the appropriate resources necessary to ensure the consistent, reliable and secure delivery of services, and understanding and anticipating the organization’s unique technology requirements.

Reporting to the Manager, IT Infrastructure and Operations, the Azure Specialist is a newly created position responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting Azure cloud resources in alignment with ASC’s cloud-first strategic direction. Responsibilities may also extend to support M365, Teams administration, and other cloud and infrastructure system administration services.

Cloud Design and Resource Deployment

• Evaluating Azure services, patterns, and operating practices against industry and Microsoft best practices.
• Providing hands‑on technical expertise to the infrastructure and cloud roadmap, as workloads migrate from on‑premises platforms to Azure.
• Designing and deploying cloud resources based on the target state architecture and design specifications, standards, requirements and best practices including network, VMs, storage, databases, and other services.
• Integrating security throughout cloud design, including identity and access management (IAM), encryption, network security, and compliance controls.
• Creating deployment plans, impact analyses, and change requests to support cloud resources.
• Configuring enterprise‑level cloud environments (landing zones) for workloads using Infrastructure‑as‑Code tools.
• Analyzing costs and trade‑offs to right‑size cloud resources based on non‑functional requirements.
• Planning and executing cloud migrations of on‑premises workloads, including cutovers and post‑migration validation, testing, and infrastructure hardening.
• Working closely with the Cloud and Infrastructure Architect to apply approved architectures, patterns, standards, and naming conventions.

Cloud Operations, Support and Maintenance

• Providing level 2/3 support for Azure based services including incidents, service requests, and contribute to incident resolution, service recovery and root‑cause analysis.
• Sharing operational metrics to identify improvement opportunities, recommend ongoing cloud cost and performance optimization and ensure compliance with the standards and policies.
• Participating in the execution of test plans (backup and recovery, DR testing, security testing).
• Utilizing monitoring tools (e.g. Azure Monitor) to configure alerts, analyze logs to proactively detect and resolve issues.

• A diploma or university degree in computer science, software engineering, management information systems or a related field.
• A minimum of 10 years of progressive experience delivering IT services including infrastructure and systems administration with a strong recent focus on Azure cloud services.
• At least three years of this experience in an operations focused, IT Azure Specialist or Azure Cloud Engineer role, which may include cloud, infrastructure, security and/or networking.
• Relevant certifications such as Microsoft Certified:
  Azure Administrator Associate, Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions and/or Teams Administration are preferred.
• Strong expertise in Microsoft Azure cloud platform, including service management and administration across computer, storage, and networking.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating scalable, resilient, and secure cloud environments, supporting cloud migrations and ongoing cost optimization.
• Knowledge of cloud deployment automation tools (Terraform or Bicep IaaC), Azure Resource Manager and Power Shell scripting and cloud monitoring.
• Strong analytical, problem‑solving, and communication skills, with the…