Specialist, DevOps & SRE

Role: Specialist, DevOps & SRE 

Location: London, Manchester or Rotherham, UK 

This role aligns with positions typically advertised in the external market as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Cloud Platform Engineer OR Senior DevOps Engineer 

About Pearson 
At Pearson we ‘add life to a lifetime of learning’ so everyone can realize the life they imagine. We do this by creating vibrant and enriching learning experiences designed for real-life impact. Pearson was founded in 1844 and has been built on our ability to grow with and adapt to a constantly evolving market. Our employees are dedicated to creating high-quality, digital-first, accessible and sustainable resources for lifelong learning.

About the Job 
This position is responsible for the reliable, secure and cost-effective operation of cloud services across AWS and Azure. The role combines DevOps, site reliability engineering and operational service management practices to automate delivery, maintain infrastructure as code, improve observability, manage cloud compliance and support resilient services across non-production and production environments.

The position troubleshoots incidents and service issues, coordinates and implements controlled changes, supports deployments and platform remediation, and works collaboratively with application, engineering, security, networking, FinOps and service management teams. Responsibilities include AWS account and resource administration, identity and access key lifecycle activities, infrastructure tagging and cost analysis, security controls such as WAF and Shield, Systems Manager maintenance, and continuous improvement of operational runbooks and automation.

About You

We expect relevant hands-on experience operating cloud platforms in a regulated, business-critical environment. You will be proactive, analytical and comfortable moving between incident response, planned change, automation and continuous improvement. You should be able to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, work effectively within globally distributed teams, document repeatable procedures and share knowledge with colleagues.

Key Skills & Experience

· Hands-on operation, administration and automation of AWS services, with working knowledge of Azure.

· Infrastructure as code using Terraform, including review, testing and controlled promotion between environments.

· CI/CD and source-control workflows using tools such as Jenkins and Git.

· Operational support for EC2, ECS, Auto Scaling, RDS, S3, EBS, FSx, CloudFront and related services.

· AWS networking, including VPCs, subnets, routing, security groups, load balancing, Route 53, VPN, Direct Connect and VPC peering.

· Cloud security and compliance controls, including IAM, KMS, WAF, Shield, Inspector, certificate management and access-key rotation.

· AWS Systems Manager, including agent maintenance and operational remediation.

· Cloud monitoring, logging and audit services, including CloudWatch and CloudTrail.

· Incident investigation, root-cause analysis, problem resolution and escalation across development, test and production environments.

· Change management, technical approvals, release support and evidence-based implementation through ServiceNow or equivalent tooling.

· Cloud governance, resource tagging, configuration consistency and compliance remediation.

· Cloud cost management, monthly cost analysis, stale-resource identification and optimisation across AWS and Azure.

· Ability to diagnose automation and configuration issues involving tags, scaling, databases, networking and deployment pipelines.

· Understanding of resilience, operational availability, disaster recovery and support during business-critical periods.

· Working knowledge of ITIL, Kanban and service management fundamentals.

· Use of Jira and Confluence to track work and maintain operational documentation and runbooks.

· Clear stakeholder communication and effective collaboration across application, infrastructure, security and engineering teams.

· Relevant cloud certification or equivalent demonstrable experience; AWS security, architecture or Azure certification is advantageous.

Desirable Skills & Experience

· Microsoft PowerShell or another scripting language for operational automation.

· Advanced Terraform module development and reusable infrastructure patterns.

· Experience improving service observability, SRE measures and operational dashboards.

· Experience supporting containerized, distributed or serverless workloads.

· Experience with FinOps practices and multi-cloud cost reporting.

· Experience mentoring colleagues and contributing to shared engineering standards and knowledge bases.

The role is aligned to either our Rotherham office, located at Junction 1 of the M18, making it commutable from Sheffield, Leeds, Doncaster, Derby or Nottingham.

All our roles are hybrid working; for this role that means visiting your base office no more than once a week with the possibility of occasional travel to other Pearson sites, however, adjustments to this due to personal circumstances & preferences are possible.

We work a 37.5 hour week, with all our team free to flex their day around our core hours, which are Monday to Friday, 10 to 4 GMT/BST. School runs, etc. can be accommodated. Other flexible working patterns can be considered, including part-time working and non-traditional hours. As we regularly work with global teams, particularly in India and the US, there may be the occasional need to accommodate meetings outside of core hours.

For this role there may be future expectation to provide out of hours support during business-critical periods.

We actively encourage our staff to participate in at least 40 hours of training a year and support relevant AWS, Azure, DevOps, SRE, security and automation learning and certification as part of this role.