Denis Lemire

denis@lemire.name

Overview

Systems and infrastructure professional, 20+ years. CTO at AirSurfer WISP; built carrier VoIP and SBCs at ThinkTel, rebuilt a full IPTV stack from scratch, and built and architected the first certified Teams Direct Routing solution in Canada. Now Staff Support at CircleCI. Runs a personal Kubernetes cluster at home for self-hosting and experimentation; homelab extends to Verilog, FPGAs, and electronics. Comfortable bridging engineering and customers: pre-sales, escalations, troubleshooting. Linux/FreeBSD since the 90s; IPv6 since 2007.

Professional Experience

• CircleCI

  Edmonton, AB (remote)

  Staff Support Engineer — September 2024 – present

  • Built and maintains personal Kubernetes cluster (KubeVirt, Longhorn, MetalLB) running CircleCI Server for validation, bug reproduction, and air-gapped QA; supported Server 4 on-prem deployments for VM provisioning, S3, and machine executor issues.

  • Authored and maintained KB articles for config validation, migrations, air-gapped support-bundle/crew install, and troubleshooting flows (including infrastructure failures such as Karpenter).

  • Tested and documented OIDC integration across CircleCI Server, AWS, Hashicorp Vault, Terraform Cloud, GCP Identity pool federation, and NPM registries.

  • Triaged Premium Support tickets (Zendesk, PagerDuty); escalated to engineering and contributed to escalation severity matrix.

  • Reproduced and confirmed platform bugs; collaborated on fixes and backports.

  DevOps Customer Engineer — January 2023 – January 2024

  • Performed config and security reviews for enterprise accounts; led config review workshop and defined Confluence-based review format.

  • Supported server-to-cloud and Server 3→4 migrations; validated OIDC adoption (AWS, Vault, GCP Identity pool federation) for secret management.

  • Troubleshot OIDC, container runner K8s installs, and Server incident support-bundle flows; provided technical guidance and passed feedback to product team.

  • Helped customers drive efficiency and scalability in DevOps practices; worked with advanced/premium accounts to demonstrate platform value.

• ThinkTel / Distributel

  Edmonton, AB

  Solutions Architect — April 2017 – December 2022

  • Rebuilt acquired Zazeen IPTV from the ground up: custom Dockerized FFmpeg transcoding pipeline and HLS packaging; migrated content acquisition (SRDU → TRDU); deployed Qumulo and Broadpeak for cloud nDVR; replaced middleware and DRM; rebuilt HTTP caching; hand-coded monitoring for live channel delivery. Platform ran until Zazeen decommission (March 2025).

  • Integrated Open Source and custom components into a certified solution for delivering Canadian PSTN to Microsoft Teams Direct Routing

    • Think 365 SBC listed among Microsoft Certified SBC Vendors; among the first three certified globally, alongside Audiocodes and Ribbons.
    • First certified Teams Direct Routing solution in Canada.

  • Championed modern DevOps: Ansible, CircleCI, Docker, Kubernetes.

  Manager, Systems Operations — January 2017 – May 2017

  • Led team responsible for systems peripheral to nationwide ISP operations (DNS, RADIUS, SQL, etc.).

  • Scaled internal SBC implementations from monolithic blade servers to multiple VMs and orchestrated containers; streamlined rollout of dedicated, geo-redundant SBCs via Docker container images.

  • Developed a "shim" SBC to front-end legacy PBXs and migrate thousands of lines to Metaswitch; protected end-of-life platforms from security vulnerabilities; dynamically routed clients line-by-line.

  Operations Manager, Commercial Cloud Services — July 2015 – January 2017

  • Managed infrastructure for hosted Lync/Skype for Business and Office 365 Cloud Connector; oversaw development and deployment of custom SBC implementations for carrier-grade SIP.

  Manager, Sales Engineering — January 2013 – July 2015

  • Expanded sales engineering beyond carrier SIP into hosted Lync, PBX, and dedicated SBC colocation; grew and mentored team of sales engineering SMEs.

  • Turned up cross-vendor IPSEC interop with customers to secure VoIP traffic before SIP TLS+SRTP was viable.

  • Coordinated turn-up of private VoIP paths over private networks, including Alberta SuperNet.

  Team Lead, Sales Engineering — May 2011 – January 2013

  • Mentored junior sales engineers; coordinated technical escalations and complex SIP deployments for carrier accounts.

  Sales Engineer — December 2010 – May 2011

  • Onboarded carrier-grade SIP customers; engineered end-to-end solutions; conquered interoperability and direct peering.

  • Conducted technical pre-sales; designed and validated SIP trunks, codecs, and peering for carrier and enterprise customers.

• Generic dot Business Ltd.

  Edmonton, AB

  Owner — November 2016 – Present

  • Technology advisory and integration for small business. Personal liaison enabling adoption of tools and platforms (web development, VoIP, IP networking, Office 365, Linux/FreeBSD) while clients focus on their core business.

  • Delivered greenfield SBS deployment, Gentoo/Asterisk PBX with SpamAssassin MTA, and Office 365 migration for long-term client.

  • Assisted a local WISP with Axia backbone turn-up and BGP/OSPF networking.

  • Network debugging and MikroTik troubleshooting for regional clients.

  • Obtained own ASN and IPv6 prefix; operates personal Kubernetes cluster for experimentation and self-hosted workloads.

• Tera-Byte Dot Com Inc.

  Edmonton, AB

  Software Developer / System Administrator — April 2008 – November 2010

  • Automation scripts for WISP provisioning across multiple vendors; migration of mail, databases, and financial data during network acquisitions; escalation point for internal tech and customer support.

  • Deployed and maintained monitoring, patching, and backup systems across acquired and legacy infrastructure.

  • Built provisioning abstractions for heterogeneous WISP gear; reduced rollout time for new sites and acquired networks.

  • Consolidated billing and customer data from acquired networks; maintained service continuity through cutovers.

  • Documented systems and handoff procedures for acquired infrastructure; reduced operational risk during integrations.

• Triton Networking Solutions Ltd. / AirSurfer Wireless

  Edmonton, AB

  Chief Technology Officer — July 2002 – April 2008

  • Maintained AirSurfer WISP (800+ locations, 1,500+ mail users across 50+ domains). Custom qmail MTA; MySQL/mod_perl billing and ticketing; Nagios/Cricket monitoring; DOCSIS network for 2,800 users; OpenLDAP; Asterisk PBX migration; HotSpot platform; Explorer Hotel (Yellowknife) network design.

  • Version-controlled qmail patch tree (CVS); integrated community and custom patches for feature-competitive mail hosting.

  • Wrote the full billing and ops stack: Perl/MySQL backend, customer web portal with real-time bandwidth monitoring, BSD-level traffic capture, and DOCSIS provisioning. One hand-rolled codebase tying billing, ticketing, and self-service together.

• OA Group Inc.

  Edmonton, AB

  Retail Sales — January 2001 – July 2002

  • White-box PC retailer (OA Computers). Sold and spec'd custom systems and components, averaged ~$100K/month in parts and builds.

  • Designed desktop configurations to customer requirements; retail arm of OA Group's ISP and technical-products operation.

Expertise

Skills

Education & Training

LFCE

Linux Foundation Certified Engineer — The Linux Foundation · 2015

IPv6 Silver (CNE6-1)

IPv6 Forum Network Engineer — Nephos6 / GoGo6 · 2014

Data Privacy, GDPR

Information Security V2 — Professional Development · 2022

SSCA

Sip School Certified Associate — The SIP School · 2012

MCITP Lync

Lync Server 2010 Administrator — Global Knowledge · 2012

IPv6 Sage

IPv6 Certification — Hurricane Electric · 2009

References

• References available upon request.