IT Manager Platform Engineering & AI Enablement

Canlan Sports is the largest private sector owner and operator of recreational sports complexes in North America. The company's success in the recreation-entertainment & hospitality industry is attributed to a combination of innovative programming, service delivery leadership and world-class sports complexes. We understand our customers’ need for service excellence and are committed to it.

Canlan Sports is currently looking for an IT Manager Platform Engineering & AI Enablement for our North York Head Office!

Salary Range: $95,000- $145,000 per year.

Job Summary

Canlan Sports has moved beyond foundational technology implementation and is now building a modern platform engineering capability that enables secure, scalable software delivery and responsible enterprise AI adoption across the organization. Reporting to the VP of Technology, the Manager, Platform Engineering & AI Enablement is a hands-on leadership role responsible for designing, operating, and governing Canlan’s cloud platforms, developer tooling, integrations, and AI-enabled solutions — shifting the function's center of gravity from infrastructure administration toward platform engineering, developer enablement, and enterprise AI adoption.

This role connects technology strategy with hands-on engineering execution. The successful candidate will lead the Data Platform and Web Development teams while overseeing cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, API and integration governance, production reliability, vendor technical accountability, and deployment practices across key business systems and digital initiatives.

The role requires a practical builder and leader: someone comfortable designing architecture, writing automation, troubleshooting production issues, guiding technical standards, influencing vendors, mentoring internal resources, and ensuring cloud-hosted platforms are secure, reliable, cost effective, and ready to scale.

The role will also play a key role in enabling Canlan’s responsible use of artificial intelligence and advanced data platforms. This includes helping evaluate, govern, operationalize, and scale AI-enabled solutions, including tools such as Snowflake Cortex, Microsoft Copilot-enabled workflows, automation agents, and business-built AI solutions that require secure, reliable, and supportable production environments.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES

Cloud Architecture & Hands-On Engineering

• Design, build, maintain, and optimize cloud infrastructure across AWS and Microsoft Azure environments.

• Establish cloud architecture patterns, guardrails, landing zones, security baselines, and deployment standards.

• Lead infrastructure-as-code initiatives using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or equivalent technologies.

• Develop and maintain backup, disaster recovery, resiliency, and business continuity practices for cloud platforms.

• Act as a senior technical escalation point for complex cloud, infrastructure, website, API, and platform issues.

• Own and evolve Canlan's Internal Developer Platform (IDP), including GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Actions, and GitHub Copilot, to standardize, automate, and accelerate software delivery for internal engineering teams.

• Perform hands-on software engineering and code review for platform tooling, automation, and internal developer tools, maintaining consistent engineering quality and standards.

Platform Reliability & Operational Ownership

• Own platform reliability across cloud-hosted applications, websites, integrations, APIs, and connected enterprise systems.

• Establish monitoring, observability, alerting, uptime, and service-health reporting standards.

• Lead major incident response, root-cause analysis, post-incident reviews, and corrective-action planning.

• Create operational runbooks, support models, escalation paths, and production-readiness checklists.

• Partner with IT Operations to ensure clean handoffs between platform engineering, infrastructure support, and end-user support.

Integration, API & Data Platform Governance

• Design and govern APIs and integrations connecting SRM, CRM, Finance, POS, websites, mobile applications, data warehouse, reporting, and future platforms.

• Establish API lifecycle, security, authentication, logging, documentation, versioning, and performance standards.

• Ensure business-critical data movement between systems is reliable, secure, observable, and supportable.

• Collaborate with internal teams and vendors to prevent integration failures from falling between accountability gaps.

AI Platform Enablement & Productionization

• Partner with business teams to evaluate AI-enabled ideas, prototypes, automations, and user-built tools, and determine the appropriate path to move viable solutions into governed production use.

• Support the technical rollout, administration, governance, and ongoing operational management of AI services and platforms, including Snowflake Cortex and other approved enterprise AI capabilities.

• Define production-readiness requirements for AI solutions, including architecture, security, identity and access, data protection, monitoring, cost controls, support ownership, documentation, and change management.

• Help transition business-developed AI tools, scripts, agents, models, and automations — including solutions built with Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and similar tools — from ad hoc or experimental use into scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable cloud or data-platform environments.

• Collaborate with data, software, operations, and business stakeholders to ensure AI solutions integrate appropriately with enterprise systems, APIs, data warehouse platforms, reporting tools, and business workflows.

• Promote responsible AI practices aligned with Canlan’s AI governance expectations, privacy obligations, cybersecurity standards, and enterprise risk-management requirements.

• Govern Power Platform and other citizen-development tools (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI) to ensure business-built solutions meet security, data governance, and supportability standards before being scaled.

• Act as an internal consultant to business leaders, identifying and evaluating AI and automation opportunities and translating business problems into viable, governed technical solutions.

• Establish AI observability, LLM usage monitoring, prompt lifecycle governance, and cost optimization practices across all approved AI platforms and tools.

Vendor, SaaS & Technical Accountability

• Serve as the technical counterpart to strategic SaaS, cloud, website, POS, payment, and platform vendors.

• Review vendor architecture, proposed changes, release plans, integration designs, security practices, and support models.

• Monitor and enforce technical performance expectations, SLA obligations, incident response, and change-control requirements.

• Escalate vendor performance issues with evidence-based technical analysis, impact summaries, and remediation recommendations.

Security, Risk & Compliance

• Embed security-by-design principles into cloud architecture, integrations, APIs, identity, network configuration, and deployment processes.

• Support identity and access management, SSO, MFA, logging, network segmentation, vulnerability remediation, and endpoint/cloud security practices.

• Partners with cybersecurity vendors and internal stakeholders to improve detection, response, hardening, and audit readiness.

• Support NIST, SOC2, privacy, cybersecurity, data governance, and technology risk-management initiatives.

• Ensure technical documentation, architecture diagrams, access models, and operational controls are maintained and auditable.

Leadership, Standards & Team Enablement

• Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship to direct reports and other IT staff.

• Define engineering standards, coding/automation practices, documentation expectations, and knowledge-sharing routines.

• Lead cross-functional technical planning sessions and translate strategic priorities into executable platform work.

• Participate in recruiting, onboarding, goal setting, and performance development for future cloud/platform engineering resources.

• Promote a culture of accountability, ownership, continuous improvement, and operational excellence.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• 8+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, systems engineering, or solution architecture.

• 3+ years in a technical lead, architect, senior engineer, supervisor, manager, or equivalent leadership role.

• Demonstrated experience designing, deploying, and operating production cloud environments in AWS and/or Microsoft Azure.

• Hands-on experience with APIs, integrations, web platforms, networking, identity, security controls, monitoring, and deployment automation.

• Experience managing business-critical production systems with availability, change-control, and incident-response requirements.

• Experience supporting, governing, or operationalizing AI-enabled platforms, data services, automation tools, or business-built technology solutions in a production environment.

• Proven ability to communicate complex technical matters clearly to executives, business stakeholders, vendors, and technical teams.

Technical Competencies

• AWS services such as VPC, EC2, RDS, Lambda, ECS/EKS, CloudFront, Route 53, WAF, IAM, CloudWatch, and related services.

• Microsoft Azure services, Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Intune, Defender, identity, endpoint management, and related administration capabilities.

• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, Ansible, PowerShell, Python, or comparable automation tools.

• CI/CD, Git-based workflows, DevOps practices, release management, environment governance, and deployment automation.

• Containers and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes or managed container services.

• API design, API management, integration patterns, authentication, logging, monitoring, and data-transfer governance.

• Networking, DNS, firewalls, VPNs, load balancers, CDN, web application firewalls, SSL/TLS, and secure architecture practices.

• Monitoring and observability tools, log analysis, incident response, root-cause analysis, and performance tuning.

• SQL, relational databases, data movement, reporting platforms, and data governance concepts.

• AI-enabled platform concepts, including responsible AI governance, production-readiness, model/tool lifecycle management, usage monitoring, prompt-enabled workflows, and operational support models.

• Snowflake, Snowflake Cortex, data warehouse platforms, semantic data layers, data pipelines, and secure access patterns for analytics and AI-enabled use cases.

• Azure OpenAI, Claude, OpenAI APIs, and other large language model platforms, including AI gateways, model lifecycle management, and prompt engineering governance; Microsoft Graph and GraphQL for enterprise data/API integration; TypeScript for internal tooling and platform development.

Preferred Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional or Associate.

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional.

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate.

• AI, data platform, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure AI, Microsoft Copilot, or responsible AI training/certification would be considered an asset.

• CISSP, CCSP, Security+, or equivalent cloud/security certification.

• ITIL Foundation or equivalent service management certification.

• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate; GitHub Copilot certification(s) where applicable; FinOps Foundation certification; Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA); or other relevant AI platform certifications would be considered an asset.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS

• Must be self-motivated, detail oriented, organized, and able to work independently with limited supervision while leading collaboratively across teams.

• Ability to participate in occasional after-hours support, maintenance windows, incident response, or vendor escalations when required.

• Strong documentation discipline, including architecture diagrams, standards, runbooks, operational records, and user-facing technical guidance where required.

• Valid driver’s license and access to reliable transportation may be required for site visits or field support where needed.

If you are interested in this role and becoming part of the Canlan team, please apply online.

NOTE: Only those applicants under consideration will be contacted. Please accept our utmost appreciation for your interest. We are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. Employment decisions are based on merit and business needs, and not on race, color, creed, age, sex, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, military service, pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions or any other classification protected by federal, provincial and local laws and ordinances. Reasonable accommodation is available for qualified individuals with disabilities, upon request. This Equal Employment Opportunity policy applies to all practices. As part of our recruitment and hiring practices, we may use AI-based tools to assist in the initial screening and assessment of applications. All final hiring decisions are made by human reviewers.