Company Description Robert B. Somerville Co. Limited is a Canada-wide provider of integrated infrastructure services, supporting critical energy and utility systems across the country. The company plans, builds, and maintains oil and gas pipelines, power networks, and other utility systems and facilities. Renewable and sustainable energy projects represent a growing and strategic part of the business, offering opportunities to contribute to future-focused initiatives. Somerville serves many of Canada’s major utilities and municipalities and frequently collaborates with other infrastructure builders and partners in extended enterprise arrangements with clients. Team members join a company that values long-term partnerships, operational excellence, and safe, reliable service delivery.
Position Summary
The IT Operations Team Lead is a hands-on technical leader responsible for the day-to-day coordination, reliability, security, and continuous improvement of the organization’s IT operations and support services. Reporting to the Head of Information Technology / CISO, this role leads a team of technical resources while remaining actively involved in escalated support, infrastructure administration, cloud services, networking, endpoint management, and operational security.
The Team Lead establishes clear priorities, promotes consistent service-management practices, develops team capability, and ensures that incidents, service requests, changes, maintenance activities, vendor engagements, and operational risks are managed effectively. The role works closely with business stakeholders, IT colleagues, and third-party providers to maintain dependable technology services across a multi-site environment.
Key Accountabilities
People Leadership and Team Coordination
- Provide day-to-day leadership, work direction, coaching, and support to technical team members across infrastructure, cloud, networking, systems administration, and end-user support.
- Assign and balance operational work based on priority, risk, complexity, capacity, and business impact; monitor progress and remove delivery obstacles.
- Conduct regular team check-ins and one-on-one meetings, provide timely feedback, support development plans, and contribute to performance and recruitment processes in partnership with the Head of IT/CISO.
- Promote accountability, respectful collaboration, knowledge sharing, cross-training, and effective succession coverage for critical operational responsibilities.
- Ensure team members follow approved policies, standards, procedures, security controls, and change management practices.
- Serve as the first point of leadership escalation for workload, service quality, operational coordination, and technical support concerns.
IT Service Management and Support Operations
- Oversee the daily operation of the IT service desk and technical support function, ensuring incidents and service requests are accurately logged, classified, prioritized, assigned, resolved, and documented.
- Monitor service levels, ticket aging, recurring issues, customer experience, and operational trends; initiate corrective actions and communicate material risks or service impacts.
- Coordinate major incident response, technical escalations, stakeholder communications, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and follow-up actions.
- Maintain and improve operational procedures, knowledge articles, runbooks, support documentation, escalation paths, and service ownership information.
- Coordinate onboarding, offboarding, access changes, equipment deployment, software licensing, asset inventory, and life cycle activities.
- Champion practical ITIL-aligned incident, request, problem, change, configuration, and knowledge-management practices.
Infrastructure, Cloud, Network, and Endpoint Operations
- Provide hands-on administration and senior-level support for Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Entra ID, Intune/Endpoint Manager, SharePoint Online, Power Platform, and related cloud services.
- Coordinate the configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting of LAN/WAN connectivity, wireless networks, firewalls, VPNs, servers, storage, virtualization platforms, backup systems, telephony, and collaboration technologies.
- Ensure daily infrastructure health checks, event and capacity monitoring, vulnerability remediation, endpoint and infrastructure patching, backup verification, and recovery testing are completed and documented.
- Lead or support technical changes, upgrades, deployments, migrations, integrations, and infrastructure improvement initiatives using appropriate planning, testing, rollback, and documentation controls.
- Provide advanced troubleshooting for escalated incidents and engage internal specialists or third-party providers when additional expertise is required.
- Maintain accurate inventories of hardware, software, licenses, cloud resources, administrative accounts, and key configuration information.
Security, Risk, and Operational Resilience
- Operate IT services in alignment with organizational cybersecurity policies, architecture standards, access-control requirements, and risk-management expectations.
- Support security incident triage, containment, investigation, recovery, evidence preservation, and escalation under the direction of the Head of IT/CISO.
- Coordinate vulnerability remediation, secure configuration, privileged-access practices, identity life cycle controls, endpoint compliance, and security monitoring within IT Operations.
- Maintain operational readiness for business continuity and disaster recovery, including current procedures, recovery dependencies, contact information, and periodic testing.
- Identify and escalate operational, technical, vendor, capacity, life cycle, and security risks, together with practical treatment recommendations.
Vendor, Project, and Stakeholder Management
- Coordinate operational activities and escalations with telecommunications' providers, managed service providers, software vendors, hardware suppliers, and other third parties.
- Validate that vendor work is appropriately authorized, documented, tested, secured, and transitioned into support.
- Contribute technical and operational expertise to projects, procurement assessments, solution reviews, budgeting, planning, and technology roadmaps.
- Communicate technical issues, risks, priorities, and recommendations clearly to business stakeholders at an appropriate level of detail.
- Prepare concise operational reports and metrics for the Head of IT/CISO, including service performance, major incidents, risks, capacity concerns, patching, vulnerabilities, and improvement actions.
Qualifications and Experience
Required Qualifications
- Post-secondary diploma or degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and progressive professional experience.
- Typically, 10 or more years of progressive experience in corporate IT operations, infrastructure, systems, networking, cloud administration, or managed IT services.
- Demonstrated experience leading, supervising, mentoring, or coordinating technical resources and operational work.
- Strong hands-on experience supporting Microsoft-centric enterprise environments, multi-site infrastructure, and business-critical technology services.
- Experience managing escalated incidents, operational changes, vendor engagements, maintenance activities, and service documentation.
- Working knowledge of cybersecurity controls, identity and access management, vulnerability remediation, backup and recovery, and incident response.
- Ability to participate in on-call rotation and provide support outside regular hours for critical operational situations.
Preferred Technical Experience
- Microsoft 365, Azure, Entra ID, Intune, Windows Server, Active Directory, SharePoint Online, PowerShell, and Power Platform.
- Enterprise networking, including LAN/WAN, TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, Wi-Fi, VPNs, firewalls, network security, and multi-site connectivity.
- Virtualization and application delivery platforms such as VMware, Citrix, or Azure Virtual Desktop.
- Backup, recovery, storage, monitoring, endpoint management, patching, software deployment, and asset-management technologies.
- IT service-management platforms and practical application of current ITIL practices.
- Relevant certifications such as ITIL, Microsoft Azure Administrator, Microsoft 365 or Endpoint Administrator, CCNA/CCNP, CompTIA Network+/Security+, NSE 4 or equivalent are considered assets.
Leadership and Core Competencies
- Approachable, accountable, and service-oriented leadership style.
- Ability to establish priorities, delegate effectively, make sound operational decisions, and remain composed during incidents or competing demands.
- Strong analytical troubleshooting, critical thinking, judgment, and risk awareness.
- Clear written and verbal communication, active listening, conflict resolution, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Commitment to documentation, process discipline, continuous improvement, knowledge transfer, and team development.
- High degree of integrity, discretion, professionalism, and attention to detail.
Additional Notes
This is a full-time role based 35 hours per week, Monday through Friday, 08:30 to 17:00 ET excluding holidays, along with support outside these hours for critical operations and support situations as they arise.
Benefits:
- Casual dress
- Company events
- Company pension
- Dental care
- Onsite parking
Salary Range: $110,000 - $135,000 per annum
Work Location: In person
Travel Required: 20–25%
Application Review Transparency
We use AI tools to assist our team with initial resume screening and organization. However, we firmly believe in the value of human judgment. We employ a strict "human-in-the-loop" framework: all qualification assessments, interview selections, and final hiring decisions are conducted exclusively by our human recruitment professionals and hiring managers.
