Senior Engineer - Cloud Operations

Learner at the Heart

Pearson is a global education company that helps people around the world to make progress in their lives through learning. With a rich heritage that combines 170 years of experience in publishing with the latest learning technology and digital services, we help people to learn whatever, wherever and however they choose. We are now transforming Pearson to accelerate our activity in digital learning, education services and emerging markets. This will enable us to make a lasting impact in helping to solve some of the most important challenges in global education.

Why We Need You

We believe education is a vital force that can empower people, help them to reach their potential and contribute to more connected communities, all around the world. Our strength comes from our outstanding people; our strong relationships in the education world; our expertise in using technology to help people learn; our global footprint and local reach; and our position as a profitable, global company with a unifying sense of purpose. We're investing in our technology and infrastructure. By working at Pearson, you have a unique chance to make a real difference to the lives of people all over the world.

Across the world we believe strength and success comes from diversity in our people - all qualified applicants are encouraged to apply. In the US, Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer M/F/V/D, and a member of E-Verify.

About Technology

Our Technology team provides the essential digital infrastructure that underpins Pearson’s global portfolio of products and platforms. We have open and collaborative teams in place working to build efficient global platforms and scaling digital products to reach hundreds of millions of learners around the world, while delivering elastic, secure, data-driven services. The Technology team also drives and coordinates how we work with technology partners to establish Pearson as a destination for innovation in education. Our aim is to ensure that our customers have access to more products and learning solutions in more regions while continually offering a high-quality user experience.

About Technology Operations

Technology Operations oversees the design, build and operation of the infrastructure that underpins and runs all technology within Pearson. The team also ensures Pearson’s core services perform at a world-class level for both customers and the business, and that our employees have access to the technology support services they need to carry out their work every day.


About the Job  

This role will be responsible for delivering the next-generation Pearson Technology platform to our global development community.  Pearson are making the transformation to a digital education company with a portfolio of cloud native applications and services.  In order to do this, we need to have a platform suitable for these new-age applications.  You will be hired as one of the best and brightest in your field who can challenge our team to think about solutions differently. As a Cloud Operations Engineer, you will be seen as a subject matter expert in your field and be part of a global team.  Your main responsibilities are to help maintain systems stability, availability, and performance levels.  You will also have the opportunity to contribute to the design and build of the Pearson Technology Services, these include but are not limited to:

 

Platform as a Service

The Pearson PaaS is built for containerised applications and encourages our developers to pursue micro-service architectures.  Built on largely open source technology such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and leveraging multiple cloud platforms both public and private to deliver a ubiquitous and consistent global platform for continuously deploying applications.

 

Infrastructure as a Service

Pearson are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy.  Due to the global nature of our education partners and the sensitive nature of some learner data, we need to exploit both public and private cloud technology.  The Pearson IaaS will be an OpenStack deployment in our own facilities which is capable of running our PaaS platform as well as workloads that require a more traditional cloud experience with the benefits of a private platform.

 

Delivery as a Service

With thousands of developers spread all over the world, getting code continuously deployed into our IaaS and PaaS platforms is no mean feat.  We are building standard delivery templates for developers to extend from in order to expedite their adoption of our technology and drive standards to support easier global deployments and interoperability of our learning products.

 

Scope

You will form part of a global team that will drive best practice in the PaaS arena, we work in a lean agile fashion with fortnightly sprints.   You will be expected to collaborate with, and support other agile product development teams and operational teams whose primary responsibilities will be to support education services in production and pre-production environments. Scope could include technical lead responsibilities, regional and functional influence, collaboration on global initiatives.  Expectation of 24/7 365 day on-call rotation.  Some travel may be required (infrequent), you are expected to work from the Pearson office at least 3-days per week with some option to work remotely if your home is a suitable and safe working environment.

 

 

About You

We’re looking for passionate engineers with a hunger to learn and adapt to new technology quickly.  We demand people who are naturally curious, can self-start and share learnings and outcomes effectively with a distributed team.

 

Things We Expect You to Know:

  • 3+ years of extensive operations experience in Linux operating systems

  • 2+years of in-depth, hands on experience of at least two major clouds (AWS, OpenStack, Azure etc…)

  • Command of config management principles and an ability to code your desired state

  • A deep understanding of distributed system design and dependency management

  • A strong grasp of monitoring tools, approach and implementation

  • Recognition of the role security plays in PaaS and Continuous Delivery

  • Able to show examples of previous work with containerised services

  • Proven experience of implementing software defined networking

  • Solid working experience of continuous integration practices & tools (Jenkins, Travis CI etc…)

  • An established history of working in agile teams

  • That DevOps is more than a job title or a marketing fad!

  • How to collaborate with a globally distributed team of engineers using tools like chat

  • Ability to quickly work with debug and errors logs

 

Our Tools of the Trade

We work at the moment with the following tools, we understand everyone will do a bit of learning on the job, but you will need to be able to meaningfully contribute to a selection of these tools:

  • Docker

  • Kubernetes

  • Terraform

  • Vault

  • Consul

  • Keycloak

  • Kafka

  • Jenkins

  • Git

  • NGINX

  • Go

  • Java/NodeJS

  • Python

  • Ruby

  • AWS

  • Hubot/CoffeeScript

 

Desirable Skills

  • Experience building roadmaps and capturing user requirements to populate backlog

  • Experience of working with or contributing directly to Open Source projects

  • Leading service delivery in a mission critical production application environment

  • Understanding of leading/managing technology products

  • Experience of working with failure based testing, for example Simian Army

  • Delivering web-scale products to a global market at high release velocity

  • The ability and desire to automate routine, mundane and non-value added tasks


 

Personal Skills

  • Proven solution leadership skills, with an ability to lead and facilitate solutioning initiatives

  • Previous experience contributing to war rooms and blameless postmortems

  • Superb communication skills, written and verbal

  • Experience of working in a true DevOps environment with daily collaborations

  • Show accountability and end to end ownership and provide and example to others

  • English as a business language


 

Challenges

  • Willing to travel to USA at various times for collaboration activities.

  • 24x7 Availability in case of emergencies

  • Working with counterparts in other global teams

  • The position may require to be a part of an on-call rotation

  • Maintaining 99.9% uptime

  • Ability to learn and absorb new technologies and skills faster

 

 
Please click the link to apply - https://pearson.taleo.net/careersection/ex/jobdetail.ftl?job=1606704