Specialist, DevOps & SRE

Pearson•Bloomington, MN

3d•$70,000 - $119,000•Hybrid

About The Position

GED Testing Service (GEDTS) operates the technology behind the GED high school equivalency credential, including the candidate-facing Portal, admin tools, mobile apps, and integrations with Pearson VUE for exam scheduling and Kibo for e-commerce. As a joint venture between Pearson and the American Council on Education (ACE), the company runs on Microsoft Azure with core workloads on Kubernetes (AKS) and production data on Azure SQL Managed Instance. GEDTS is hiring a DevOps Engineer to join their agile technology team. This role is a partnership with an experienced DevOps contractor, involving shared ownership of the platform, improving automation, supporting production, and growing in-house capability while learning a mature and evolving Azure environment.

Requirements

3+ years of DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE experience in production environments.
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 experience with disciplined plan/apply practices and remote state.
Kubernetes operations: troubleshooting workloads, ingress, secrets, upgrades, and persistent storage.
CI/CD experience (Azure DevOps preferred, or equivalent with readiness to adopt it).
Comfort being reachable via Slack outside business hours when production needs attention; coverage is shared with the development team and existing contractor.
Ability to collaborate closely with a senior contractor: communicative, curious, and willing to learn the existing system before changing it.

Nice To Haves

Minneapolis-area or able to be in the office regularly at the start of the role.
Experience designing analytics data boundaries (reporting replicas, ETL patterns, or network-isolated access to production data).
Tableau deployment or migration experience.
Security operations familiarity (Sentinel, EDR, cert lifecycle management).
Exposure to FedRAMP, SOC 2, or similar compliance programs.
Familiarity with Spring Boot, ActiveMQ/JMS, Splunk, New Relic, or Azure Firewall.

Responsibilities

Operate and troubleshoot AKS clusters, including upgrades, deployments, ingress, and supporting Azure infrastructure across production, staging, and lower environments.
Maintain and extend Terraform for networking, Application Gateway, Azure Firewall, Front Door, Key Vault, container registry, and related platform resources.
Build and improve Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines and modernize deployment workflows.
Support zero-downtime and planned-downtime deployments and production incident response.
Maintain Azure SQL Managed Instance health, including backup schedules, monitoring, capacity, and ensuring production data protection.
Provide evidence for security and compliance questions (e.g., encryption at rest, backup posture, and access boundaries).
Support the evolution of analytics architecture, including secure patterns for Tableau access without exposing PII.
Improve observability using Azure performance monitoring, cert expiration tracking, and operational visibility.
Advance security and operational tooling (monitoring, endpoint protection, key management, and remediation).
Reduce technical debt across infrastructure (e.g., end-of-life servers, unused VMs, legacy networking resources).
Support static content and deployment improvements (blob storage, CDN/SWA patterns, front-end asset publishing).
Navigate requirements from the Pearson organization (centralized logging, vulnerability scanning, VPN access, partner integrations) while ensuring GEDTS progresses.