Infrastructure Architect

Telesat (NASDAQ and TSX: TSAT) is a leading global satellite operator, providing reliable and secure satellite-delivered communications solutions worldwide to broadcast, telecommunications, corporate and government customers for over 50 years.  Backed by a legacy of engineering excellence, reliability and industry-leading customer service, Telesat has grown to be one of the largest and most successful global satellite operators.

Telesat Lightspeed, our revolutionary Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network, scheduled to begin service in 2027, will revolutionize global broadband connectivity for enterprise users by delivering a combination of high capacity, security, resiliency and affordability with ultra-low latency and fiber-like speeds. Telesat is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and has offices and facilities around the world.

The company’s state-of-the-art fleet consists of 14 GEO satellites, the Canadian payload on ViaSat-1 and one LEO 3 demonstration satellite.  For more information, follow Telesat on X and LinkedIn or visit www.telesat.com

The Infrastructure Architect will lead the architecture and design of IT infrastructure essential for the development of Telesat Lightspeed, encompassing both datacentres and Cloud environments. This role involves managing strategy, deliverables, documentation, and final design in collaboration with the existing team, Network Architect, and Cloud Architect to ensure a robust and scalable infrastructure.

The Infrastructure Architect will own the overall IT infrastructure design for Telesat Lightspeed.

The Infrastructure Architect will be required to ensure that current and evolving IT resource requirements are captured, tracked and analyzed as well as costed. They will be required to engage with stakeholders on a regular basis and be able to present and defend design decisions at a both technical and financial level.

Candidates must live in the Ottawa area or be willing to relocate to Ottawa.

Candidates must be willing to be onsite in the office at least 4-5 days per week. 

Main Responsibilities

• Establish hardware standards, standard vendors, and hardware support models across Telesat datacentres.
• Attend stakeholder and project meetings as required.
• Work with stakeholders to establish actual resource requirements, forecast incremental growth of resource requirements over time, and prepare cost estimates.
• Assist the datacentre engineering team with rack layouts, cooling, and power models.
• Collaborate with other architects to develop a comprehensive design based on established requirements for Lightspeed, ensuring both availability and security.
• Document the overall design of the hardware and related Basic Infrastructure Services (BIS) required for Operations, as well as any automation for IaC (Infrastructure as Code).
• Assist in the development of build books for IT Infrastructure.

Education & Experience Required

• University degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or related stream.
• Must have at least 7 years’ experience in the installation, configuration and operation of data centre based environments including servers, storage and networking.
• Must have at least 5 years’ experience in building out on-premise, secure data centre based hardware clusters (network, servers and storage).
• Must have at least 5 years’ experience in design, building and managing enterprise networks including network switches, firewalls and related monitoring.
• Proven experience in the deployment and operation of Cloud-based infrastructure is required.
• Proven experience in the deployment and operation of hypervisors (VMware, KVM) is required.

Specialized Skills, Knowledge & Abilities

• Strong experience with building and running large scale, high-available and fault-tolerant network infrastructure.
• Strong experience with various distros of Linux including RedHat and Ubuntu including daily operations.
• Strong experience with building and operations of various storage technologies and platforms as well as associated network transports (e.g. iSCSI, NFS).
• Strong experience in the building and operation of dedicated, isolated infrastructure services such as DNS and NTP.
• Strong knowledge of Cloud-based Infrastructure including specific vendor-based services and technologies.
• Strong knowledge of IAM and access management strategies and tooling.
• Experience leveraging scripts to build infrastructure (e.g. bash, Python, Terraform, Ansible).
• Experience in the design of datacentre management platforms including DCIM as well as various monitoring and alerting tools.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes deployments considered an asset.
• Familiarity with SRE concepts considered an asset.

Decision Making & Supervision

• The incumbent will own the IT infrastructure design and architecture. They will be required to make and defend any decisions or assumption regarding the IT infrastructure design.
• This role has no direct reports but will work and interact with multi-disciplinary engineering and IT teams.

Working Conditions

• Ability to travel between 3 sites in the Ottawa-Gatineau area is required (<10%)
• Ability to travel to an alternate data centre is required (<5%)

The successful candidate must be a Canadian citizen (5+ years) and be able to obtain clearance under the Canadian Controlled Goods program (CGP).

At Telesat, we take pride in being an equal opportunity employer that values equality in the workplace.   We are committed to providing the best candidate experience possible including any required accommodations at every stage of our interview process.   All qualified applicants that have been selected for an interview that require accommodations, are advised to inform the Telesat Talent team accordingly.  We will work with you to meet your needs.   All accommodation information provided will be treated as confidential.