Advanced Specialist, DevOps & SRE

About the role

DEVOPS ENGINEER

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.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Platform and reliability

* 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

Partnership

* Document and transfer knowledge about the system so the team is not dependent on any one person

WHAT YOU BRING

Required

* 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)