CIRA Representatives

Amanda Swain, Director of Engineering, DNS & Cyber Security 

Amanda is the Director of Engineering for the DNS & Cyber Security group at CIRA. She is an accomplished technology leader who is passionate about helping to build teams of empowered and enabled engineers. Her focus is building a culture of trust, innovation, and excellence.

Since joining CIRA in 2011, Amanda has changed job titles a few times, growing from an individual contributor to being Director of Engineering. She has helped to build, run, and support the critical systems that CIRA supports including multiple registry re-writes, and our world-wide DNS infrastructure.

Prior to joining CIRA, Amanda was a Linux/UNIX Systems Engineer at a number of companies including NBCUniversal, Hewlett-Packard, Halogen, and Syncrude where she focused on reliability and security through automation.

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Karen Marks, DevOps Specialist, DNS

Karen is a DevOps Specialist in DNS. She graduated from the University of Toronto Engineering Science program, with a specialty in computers. She has worked as an integration and test specialist, a system administrator and now a devops specialist. She loves being the person in the background that enables other people do their jobs, and sees how things fit in the larger picture. She currently does this by working on the provisioning, logging and monitoring tools for our company. She found this career path mostly by luck, but she believes it is where she thrives and an area that women can bring a lot of value to. She hope to help others reach it more intentionally than she did.

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Sanita Alias, Vice-President, People, Culture, and Brand

Sanita Alias leads people, culture, and brand at CIRA to ensure the organization is living its values internally and communicating them externally. Since joining CIRA in 2017, Sanita has helped build a vibrant and unique culture that has led to the organization being named a National Capital Region Top Employer four times, and Kincentric Best Employer twice. Sanita was also a finalist for HR Leader of the Year as part of the 2020 and the 2021 Canadian HR Awards.

Prior to joining CIRA, Sanita was the regional HR manager at the Fortune 500 Company, Rockwell Automation. She also served as HR director at Plasco Energy Group, a waste-to-energy start-up. She is a trusted HR business leader with a focus on developing talent and inspiring change.

Sanita is a graduate of the University of Ottawa and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Honours Communication. Sanita also holds a Certified Human Resources Leader (CHRL) designation.

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Yachen Shen, Senior Software Developer 

Yachen Shen is a Senior Software Developer at CIRA. She graduated from Queen’s University 4 years ago and she has been with CIRA since then. She has worked on many different projects in all their stages of development. She is very happy to answer any questions regarding front end, back end, databases, quality assurance, and CI/CD!

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The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is a member-based not-for-profit organization, best known for managing the .CA internet domain on behalf of all Canadians. They are building programs, products and services that leverage all the internet has to offer to help build a trusted internet for Canadians.