Security Operations Compliance Specialist

Job Summary

Reporting to the Director, Technology Operations, Centre for Advanced Computing (CAC), the Security Operations Compliance Specialist (Specialist) is part of a team responsible for ensuring compliance with CAC’s policies, practices, recognized cybersecurity frameworks, while investigating cyber risk to facilitate remediation of identified vulnerabilities across the centre.

CAC is a regional partner in Canada’s national digital research infrastructure and works closely with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada to support secure, high‑performance research computing environments for researchers across Canada. In this context, the Specialist contributes to a trusted and compliant security posture that enables advanced research, data stewardship, and national collaboration.

The Specialist identifies and assesses risk, documents remediation and risk acceptance options, and provides subject‑matter expertise on security operations and compliance. As a subject‑matter expert, the Specialist also maintains oversight of the security maintenance program as well as reporting on findings and recommending corrective action. The Specialist maintains a strong collaborative working relationship with internal teams, external partners, and clients, supporting the CAC’s mission to deliver secure, scalable, and reliable research computing services.

• Follows established security frameworks, to provide input into compliance requirements, security design solutions, security training material, workshops and communication updates.
• Maintains the security of numerous systems, ensuring configuration, monitoring, reporting and policies support the privacy requirements and security standards.
• Participates in the development of cybersecurity operations capabilities and activities, which include security design requirements, operational maintenance activities, documentation and the collection of evidence necessary for compliance objectives.
• Participates in the delivery of security assessments to ensure compliance with security policies, standards and procedures.
• Participates in the delivery of security services, including the collection of cyber‑threat intelligence, security vulnerability management, perpetual scanning (VA), logging and monitoring, SIEM, event correlation, operational metrics and reporting, as well as specialized security needs and services pertaining to the network.
• Supports and contributes to security‑focused workshops, training sessions, and knowledge‑transfer activities for researchers, technical staff, and partners, aligned with CAC priorities and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada standards.
• Anticipates security breaches and remains up to date on intelligence, including hackers’ methodologies; maintains high degree of knowledge by tracking trends and best practices.
• Develops and deploys security monitoring use cases.
• Triages and analyzes security events to prioritize and elevate alerts that exceed thresholds.
• Analyzes cybersecurity events and incidents to determine the root cause and apply the appropriate mitigation measures.
• Creates scripts and implements tools to automate and develop a variety of configuration and update tasks including signature updates, rule changes, and policy updates on security devices.
• Assists in the delivery of vulnerability assessments to ensure compliance with security policies, standards and procedures, and takes corrective action to mitigate identified security vulnerability.
• Collaborates with diverse groups of internal and external IT teams and key stakeholders by interacting effectively and persuasively to investigate and resolve security violations.
• Participates in the development and management of security metrics for cybersecurity operations, with the aim of strengthening the security posture.
• Creates, maintains and publishes security documentation.
• Participates in change review boards as requested; reviews network security requirements for firewall changes, data encryption and other network security measures to ensure access and authorization controls are in place.
• Researches more effective security processes and implements application/processes…