Architect Cloud Platform
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Architect Cloud Platform

Description

At Pearson, we're committed to a world that's always learning and to our talented team who makes it all possible. From bringing lectures vividly to life to turning textbooks into laptop lessons, we are always re-examining the way people learn best, whether it's one child in our own backyard or an education community across the globe. We are bold thinkers and standout innovators who motivate each other to explore new frontiers in an environment that supports and inspires us to always be better. By pushing the boundaries of technology - and each other to surpass these boundaries - we create seeds of learning that become the catalyst for the world's innovations, personal and global, large and small.

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 engineering the next-generation Pearson Technology platform to our global development community. Pearson is 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 and have an inherent appreciation of how user experience, in particular developer experience of our products will be a critical factor in uptake and adoption.

As an Architect at Pearson, you will be seen as an expert in your field and will 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 microservice architectures. Built on largely open source technology such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and leveraging multiple public cloud platforms to deliver a ubiquitous and consistent global platform for continuously deploying applications.

With thousands of developers spread all over the world, getting code continuously deployed into our infrastructure and platform 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 Architecture in the Platform 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, driving architecture decisions, regional and functional influence, collaboration on global initiatives. Some travel may be required (infrequent), you are expected to work from the Pearson office with the option to work remotely if your home is a suitable and safe working environment.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and a member of E-Verify. All qualified applicants, including minorities, women, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Qualifications

About You

We're looking for a passionate Architect who can own and drive the technical direction of the Platform. 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:

* Extensive engineering experience with Linux operating systems


* In-depth, hands on experience of at least two major clouds (AWS, Google, Azure etc…)


* Understanding of GitOps


* A deep understanding of distributed system design and dependency management


* A strong grasp of monitoring tools, approach and implementation


* Able to show examples of previous work exploiting containerized services


* Solid working experience of continuous integration practices & tools (Jenkins, Travis CI, GitLab, 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



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:

Required:

* AWS


* Git


* Docker


* Kubernetes


* Terraform


* Ansible


* NGINX


* Calico



Must have solid experience with at least 1 of the languages below:

* Go


* Java


* Python



Good to have:

* Jenkins/GitLab


* Vault


* Consul


* Prometheus


* Understanding of networks


* Testing and quality engineering


* CI/CD components and process design


* System metrics gathering for improvements



Desirable Skills

* Understanding and experience of leading/managing technology products


* Drive technical and architectural decisions to the various development teams


* Mentor technical staff around technical direction and architectural decisions


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


* Experience working in a test-driven development environment



Personal Skills

* Previous experience of contributing to war rooms and blameless postmortems


* Superb communication skills, written and verbal


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


* English as a business language



#LI-POST

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and a member of E-Verify. All qualified applicants, including minorities, women, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Primary Location: US-CA-San Francisco

Other Locations US-CA-San Jose

Work Locations: US-CA-San Francisco-50 California 50 California Street San Francisco 94111

Job: Technology

Organization: Technology & Operations

Employee Status: Regular Employee

Job Type: Standard

Shift: Day Job

Job Posting: May 31, 2019

Job Unposting: Ongoing

Schedule: Full-time Regular

Req ID: 1906453

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer and a member of E-Verify. All qualified applicants, including minorities, women, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.