Director Cloud and Hosting Services
Apply NowCompany: Pearson Education
Location: Durham, NC 27713
Description:
Job Description
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
Operational Excellence & Reliability Engineering
People Leadership & Team Development
Qualifications & Technical Expertise
Preferred Qualifications
Why Join Pearson?
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.