DevOps Engineer

GED Testing Service (GEDTS) operates the technology behind the GED high school equivalency credential: the candidate-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 (ACE), running on Microsoft Azure with core workloads on Kubernetes (AKS) and production data on Azure SQL Managed Instance.

We are hiring a DevOps Engineer to join our agile technology team. You will work alongside an experienced DevOps contractor who knows our environment deeply. This is a partnership role: you will share ownership of our platform, improve automation, support production, and help us grow our in-house capability while learning a mature Azure estate that is still evolving.

What you'll do

Platform & reliability

Operate and troubleshoot AKS clusters: 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

Data platform (high priority)

Maintain Azure SQL Managed Instance health: backup schedules, monitoring, capacity, and operational confidence that production data is protected
Answer security and compliance questions with evidence (e.g., encryption at rest, backup posture, and access boundaries)
Support analytics architecture as it evolves, including secure patterns for Tableau access without exposing PII

Security, hygiene, and modernization

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)

Enterprise context

Navigate requirements from the Pearson organization (centralized logging, vulnerability scanning, VPN access, partner integrations) while keeping GEDTS moving

What you bring

Required:

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

Preferred:

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\

Location & work arrangement:

Full-time. Primarily remote, with preference for candidates who can come into the Minneapolis office about once a week during the first months of the role. Over time, that eases toward fully remote. Minneapolis-based candidates are a strong plus.

Availability:

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

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

The full-time salary range for this role is $70,000 – $119,000. This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program. Information on benefits can be found here.

Applications will be accepted through 10th September 2026. This window may be extended depending on business needs.

Apply today and imagine the impact you can make.

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