A specialist engineering recruitment agency working across Ottawa’s distinctive technical market — telecom, photonics and semiconductor hardware out of Kanata North, and cleared software and systems engineering feeding federal and defence procurement. We approach people directly, because most of the strongest candidates here are not browsing job boards.
Kanata North remains a genuinely large technology cluster — tens of thousands of jobs and a real concentration of telecom, photonics and semiconductor engineering — even while individual anchor employers have run their own layoff cycles tied to the broader telecom-equipment downturn. Hiring here rewards a market map, not a single company’s headline.
Layered on top is a defence-procurement build-out running into the tens of billions of dollars over the next two decades, which is driving demand for cleared engineers even as the federal public service itself goes through a genuine multi-year contraction that is squeezing the IT-contractor ecosystem around it.
Clearance processing times for defence and federal-adjacent roles have stretched well beyond historical norms, and a search that does not plan around that timeline stalls regardless of how strong the shortlist is. Clearance status is often the real filter, ahead of skills or experience.
We are headquartered in London, Ontario, and we recruit into the National Capital Region the way we recruit everywhere: mapping the market and approaching people directly, including people who are not actively job-hunting because their clearance and their current role are hard to walk away from lightly.
We recruit construction and technology roles in Ottawa the same way, whenever the mandate calls for it — this page focuses on engineering because that is where most of our Ottawa search work sits.
Related reading: questions to ask an engineering recruiter, and what engineering recruitment agencies charge in Canada.
Yes. We recruit engineering, construction and technology professionals across Ontario, including Ottawa, Kanata and the National Capital Region. We are an engineering recruitment agency covering Canada and the USA, headquartered in London, Ontario.
Cleared software and systems engineers for defence and federal-adjacent IT work, telecom and photonics hardware engineers, and cybersecurity specialists are consistently the hardest roles to fill in Ottawa.
No. We are headquartered in London, Ontario and recruit nationally. For senior and specialist roles that rarely matters, because the work is direct approach rather than local advertising — and a national view of compensation is usually more useful to an employer than a local address.
Ottawa salaries for cleared software, systems and telecom engineering roles are competitive with Toronto for equivalent seniority, and clearance status often matters more to compensation than title does.
Yes. Confidential searches — replacing someone still in post, or building a role you cannot advertise — are handled through retained executive search, where nothing about the mandate is visible in the market.
We are a specialist search firm, and “engineering headhunters” is the older word for the same work. We do not post roles or forward applicants; we map a market and approach people directly, most of whom are not looking. Permanent placement is the only work we do.
A conversation about the Ottawa hire ahead of you — local, relocating, or remote, and what each route realistically costs.