Director Cloud and Hosting Services

Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Location: Durham, NC (Hybrid - 3 days onsite per week)

Job Type: Full-time

Reports To: VP Site Reliability

About Pearson

At Pearson, our mission is to provide world-class learning experiences that help people advance in their lives. As we continue to expand our digital learning platforms, we are committed to building a scalable, resilient, and high-performing technology ecosystem that supports our global audience.

About the Role

We are seeking a Director of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to lead the transformation of our reliability strategy, foster a high-performance engineering culture, and position Pearson's products for scale and growth. This role requires a blend of technical leadership, operational excellence, and people development to embed modern SRE practices across the organization.

As a senior leader, you will be responsible for shaping Pearson's SRE strategy, evolving our cloud infrastructure, and championing automation-first principles to improve the availability, performance, and security of our systems. You will lead the cultural shift towards reliability as a core engineering discipline while enabling teams to move faster with confidence.

This role requires onsite collaboration in our Durham, NC office three days per week, fostering strong cross-functional partnerships, mentorship, and hands-on leadership in a hybrid environment.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic & Cultural Leadership

• Define and execute a modern SRE strategy that aligns with Pearson's business and product growth objectives.
• Lead the cultural transformation towards automation, observability, and self-service reliability engineering.
• Establish and refine service reliability metrics (SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets) to drive continuous improvement.
• Partner with Engineering, Security, and Product teams to develop a scalable, high-performance platform.
• Advocate for best-in-class reliability practices, ensuring teams adopt a proactive approach to system resiliency.

Operational Excellence & Reliability Engineering

• Own the availability, performance, and scalability of Pearson's mission-critical cloud services.
• Drive automation-first approaches to incident response, monitoring, and cloud infrastructure management.
• Improve incident response processes, reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Implement modern observability and monitoring solutions, ensuring real-time visibility into system health.
• Strengthen CI/CD practices, enabling seamless and safe deployments through progressive delivery strategies.

People Leadership & Team Development

• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing SRE team that drives innovation and operational excellence.
• Cultivate an inclusive and collaborative engineering culture, fostering learning, career growth, and technical mastery.
• Develop and implement talent strategies, ensuring a strong pipeline of SRE expertise.
• Encourage cross-team knowledge sharing, ensuring best practices in reliability and automation are widely adopted.

Qualifications & Technical Expertise

• 10+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, cloud infrastructure, or software engineering, with 5+ years in leadership roles.
• Proven expertise in AWS architecture, cloud operations, and best practices for high-scale, distributed systems.
• Strong experience with Terraform (Infrastructure-as-Code) to manage cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Hands-on experience with GitHub Actions for CI/CD and GitOps methodologies for managing deployments.
• Deep understanding of SRE principles, observability, and incident management.
• Strong ability to influence engineering and leadership teams, aligning technology with business needs.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with a track record of driving organization-wide adoption of reliability practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AIOps and automation-driven reliability solutions.
• Knowledge of cloud cost optimization (FinOps) and strategies for efficient infrastructure management.
• Background in regulated industries (e.g., finance, healthcare, education) with complex compliance and reliability needs.

Why Join Pearson?

• Lead the transformation of our reliability engineering strategy, driving cultural and technical change.
• Work with cutting-edge technologies, including AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions, and GitOps.
• Be part of a collaborative, high-impact engineering culture with a balance of onsite engagement and flexibility.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and opportunities for career growth at a global leader in education technology.

Who we are:

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other group protected by law. We actively seek qualified candidates who are protected veterans and individuals with disabilities as defined under VEVRAA and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.

If you are an individual with a disability and are unable or limited in your ability to use or access our career site as a result of your disability, you may request reasonable accommodations by emailing TalentExperienceGlobalTeam@grp.pearson.com.

Job: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: Corporate Strategy & Technology

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Workplace Type:

Req ID: 19476