Sr. DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer

Education Technology Services (ETS), a dynamic sub-division of Strategic Education Inc (SEI), is dedicated to revolutionizing the landscape of online education. Our flagship products, Sophia Learning and Workforce Edge, are at the forefront of providing accessible, affordable, and high-quality education solutions. Sophia Learning offers self-paced online general education courses recommended for college credit, while Workforce Edge is a cutting-edge education benefit management platform.

We're seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer supporting the Sophia Learning and Workforce Edge platforms. The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on expertise with strong technical leadership setting standards, mentoring engineers, designing scalable solutions, and supporting compliance initiatives. This is a high-impact role for someone who thrives at the intersection of engineering excellence and operational reliability.

What You'll Do

• Architect, design, and implement scalable, cloud-native solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using serverless technologies (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions) and Kubernetes (GKE)
• Lead end-to-end delivery of infrastructure and platform solutions, including design, development, testing, deployment, and continuous improvement
• Own and evolve the organization's CI/CD strategy, including build automation, testing gates, and production deployment workflows
• Design and maintain containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes), including Helm charts, autoscaling strategies, and service mesh configurations
• Build and optimize serverless architectures to improve scalability and reduce operational overhead and cost
• Establish and enforce best practices for scalability, availability, security, and performance across production systems
• Drive observability and monitoring strategies (logging, alerting, incident response)
• Lead production support and reliability efforts, including incident management, root cause analysis, and postmortems
• Mentor engineers on cloud architecture, DevOps practices, and infrastructure-as-code patterns
• Partner cross-functionally with product, security, and engineering teams to deliver business value quickly
• Manage complex initiatives in an agile environment, balancing technical debt with feature delivery
• Identify and evaluate emerging technologies, rapidly prototyping solutions to inform technical direction
• Champion automation, process improvement, and tooling modernization across engineering

Required Experience

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• 5+ years of DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering experience
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with GCP
• 3+ years of Kubernetes experience
• Strong experience with serverless architectures
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code
• Hands-on experience with Docker and container registries
• Familiarity with Kubernetes autoscaling and node provisioning tools

CI/CD, Automation & Development

• Expert-level experience with CI/CD tools
• Strong proficiency with Git
• Experience with scripting and automation
• Experience building and consuming REST APIs
• Familiarity with GitOps workflows

Observability, Data & Security

• Experience with monitoring and observability tools
• Experience working with databases and distributed systems
• Familiarity with security scanning and vulnerability management tools

Preferred Experience

• Familiarity with AI coding assistants and integrating them into engineering workflows
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines that incorporate automated analysis or decision-making alongside traditional processes
• Understanding of when to apply automation vs. human judgment, with appropriate safeguards
• Interest in evolving the SDLC through AI-driven practices such as prompt engineering and tool orchestration

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field or equivalent experience

Preferred Certifications

• GCP Professional certifications

Other:

• Must be able to travel 10% of time.
• Must be able to lift 20 lbs.
• Typical office setting.
• Mobility within the office including movement from floor to floor.
• Travel via plane, car, and metro may be required to perform this job.
• Must be able to work more than 40 hours per week when business needs warrant
• Access information using a computer.
• Effectively communicate, both up and down the management chain.
• Effectively cope with stressful situations
• Strong mental acuity
• Regular, dependable attendance and punctuality are essential functions of this job.
• Other essential functions and marginal job functions are subject to modification.

** The final stage of the interview process will require an in-person interview at either our Herndon, VA or Minneapolis, MN location **