Sr. Certification Designer, Data Center Certifications

Description

Are you an accomplished certification designer ready to shape the future of data center workforce credentialing through rigorous exam development, psychometric excellence, and data-driven program innovation across AWS's global Data Center Communities?

AWS Data Center Learning's mission is to develop the best data center workforce on Earth. The organization is responsible for providing training, certification, and career development pathways to all new and existing AWS data center employees worldwide. Our team is constantly looking to optimize the experience and provide our operations teams with a work-ready, credentialed workforce.

Our Certification team is seeking a Senior Certification Designer who moves beyond traditional assessment design and leads collaborative job-task analysis workshops to blueprint and build industry-leading certification programs. In this role you will act as a credentialing strategist, psychometric practitioner, and empathetic designer, partnering with cross-functional teams to build certification ecosystems that span exam development, item writing, blueprint design, credential management, and certification pathway architecture.

This position requires consistent collaboration with Senior Leaders in Data Center Operations, Safety, Security, Logistics, Planning, Delivery, and other teams to design and deliver valid, reliable, and defensible certification programs. You will consult with technical subject-matter experts, apply psychometric principles and emerging technologies, and use data-driven iteration to produce certification experiences that drive measurable workforce capability outcomes.

We are looking for a professional who designs and delivers innovative certification solutions  ideal candidate will have proven mastery of exam development methodologies, job-task analysis, item writing best practices, psychometric principles, and credentialing standards (such as ISO 17024 or equivalent). You must be able to manage multiple complex certification projects simultaneously, mentor fellow designers, and drive the future certification development roadmap.

The ideal candidate demonstrates ownership of outcomes, thinks big about scalable credentialing solutions, dives deep into psychometrics and operational challenges, and maintains the highest standards while moving fast to meet business needs.

As the Senior Certification Designer, you will represent our organization across Data Center Communities. This entails translating organizational competency frameworks into actionable certification strategies that balance rigor and agility: modular, scalable exam architectures that adapt to evolving workforce needs.

Your role will require communicating at all levels of the organization, working with senior leaders, and building relationships across global time zones and geographies.

Key job responsibilities

- Design and manage end-to-end certification programs-from exam blueprinting and item development through field testing, standard setting, and credential maintenance.

- Facilitate job-task analysis workshops and apply competency-mapping principles to create defensible certification blueprints.

- Lead item writing workshops, guiding SMEs in developing high-quality exam items (multiple choice, scenario-based, performance-based) aligned to blueprint domains.

- Apply psychometric techniques (classical test theory, IRT, item statistics, standard-setting methodologies) to ensure exam validity and reliability.

- Use performance analytics and candidate feedback to iterate on exam design, optimize item banks, and demonstrate program quality.

- Lead cross-functional certification projects in matrixed environments, mentoring junior designers and raising credentialing standards.

- Design scalable, modular item banks and certification architectures supporting multiple credential levels, roles, and geographies.

- Manage the full certification lifecycle and communicate strategy alignment with senior leadership across Global Data Center Operations.

A day in the life

Your morning kicks off with a little detective work-diving into item bank analytics and pass/fail dashboards, hunting down those sneaky underperforming items with lousy discrimination indices or bias flags waving for attention. Next, you'll pop into strategic meetings with senior leaders from Data Center Operation, playing translator between "here's what's breaking in the field" and "here's what our certification roadmap needs to fix."

By mid-morning, you're running a job-task analysis workshop with subject-matter experts-think: sticky notes flying, task criticality debates getting spicy, and knowledge requirements taking shape for a shiny new data center operations credential. After lunch (fuel up, you'll need it), you're leading an item writing jam session-coaching SMEs on crafting scenario-based questions that actually make people think, red-penning drafts for technical accuracy, and making sure everything maps back to those all-important…