Specialist, DevOps & SRE

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 Dev Ops Engineer to join our agile technology team. You will work alongside an experienced Dev Ops 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.

• 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 Dev Ops CI/CD pipelines and modernize deployment workflows
• Support zero-downtime and planned-downtime deployments and production incident response

• 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

• 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 keeping GEDTS moving

• 3+ years of Dev Ops, 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 Dev Ops 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

• 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)
• 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

Full‑time. Primarily remote, with…