Advanced Specialist, DevOps & SRE

GED Testing Service builds and operates the technology behind the GED high school equivalency credential: a student-facing portal, admin tools, mobile apps, and integrations with Pearson VUE for exam scheduling and Kibo for e-commerce. We are a joint venture between Pearson and the American Council on Education. Our platform runs on Microsoft Azure , with core workloads on Kubernetes (AKS) and production data on Azure SQL Managed Instance ., * Operate and troubleshoot AKS clusters: upgrades, deployments, ingress, and the supporting Azure infrastructure across production, staging and lower environments

• Maintain and extend Terraform for networking, Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Front Door, Key Vault and container registry
• Build and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, support zero-downtime deployments, and take part in production incident response

Data platform (high priority)

• Keep our Azure SQL Managed Instance healthy: backups, monitoring, capacity, and operational confidence that production data is protected
• Support secure analytics patterns that make data available to Tableau without exposing PII

Security and compliance

• Provide technical evidence for audits, ISO 27001/27701 and client security questionnaires: encryption, access, logging, backups and platform controls
• Own day-to-day security hygiene: vulnerability management, access certification, certificate lifecycle, and coordination of penetration tests and disaster recovery exercises, Azure
• AKS
• Terraform
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Azure DevOps
• Docker/ACR
• Key Vault
• Redis
• Application Gateway
• Front Door
• Splunk
• New Relic
• Tableau
• Spring Boot
• Angular

Why this role

• Real ownership of a platform serving live candidates, including the database behind them
• Breadth beyond Kubernetes: SQL Managed Instance health, security, analytics architecture and legacy cleanup all matter here
• Deep context from an experienced contractor who knows GEDTS inside and out, with the expectation that you become a second owner of it

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform engineering or SRE, including independent ownership of cloud infrastructure
• Strong Microsoft Azure skills: AKS, networking, Key Vault, Application Gateway or similar ingress patterns
• Hands-on experience with SQL Server in Azure (Managed Instance or equivalent): backups, monitoring, performance and operational troubleshooting
• Terraform with disciplined plan/apply practices and remote state
• Kubernetes operations: workloads, ingress, secrets, upgrades and persistent storage
• CI/CD experience, Azure DevOps preferred
• Ability to partner with a senior contractor on knowledge transfer in both directions, learning the existing system before changing it, and mentoring peers on reliability and automation practices

Strongly prefer

• Minneapolis area, or able to come into the office regularly at the start of the role
• Familiarity with security audits, questionnaires and control frameworks (ISO 27001/27701, StateRAMP or similar)
• Experience designing secure analytics access patterns using ETL, reporting stores or other controlled approaches
• Tableau Server support, including OAuth-based SSO integration
• Regulated or high-availability environments (education, assessment, healthcare, fintech)

Full-time, primarily remote. We would like you in the Minneapolis office about once a week for the first few months, easing toward fully remote over time. Minneapolis-based candidates are a strong plus, but we will consider strong remote applicants.

This is not a traditional pager rotation, but you will need to be reasonably reachable via Slack outside business hours when production issues arise. Coverage is shared with the development team and the existing contractor.

Compensation at Pearson is influenced by factors including skill set, experience, and location.

The full-time salary range for this role is $120,000 - $148,000. This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program. Information on benefits can be found here.

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world’s lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn’t just what we do. It’s who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.