SRE Architect

We fuse together exceptional talent who deliver outstanding software solutions. Our approach has helped us grow 60% in 2021, 94% in 2022, while in 2023 we joined forces with Insight, a Fortune 500 company and a leading solutions and systems integrator. With exciting growth plans and cutting-edge projects, there has never been a better time to join our incredible team. \n\nSRE Architect / Principal Engineer\n\nAbout the role\n\nWe are looking for a highly experienced SRE Architect / Principal Engineer to help lead the infrastructure and reliability architecture for the technology landscape as we accelerate our modernisation journey.\n\nOur broader architectural direction is already taking shape, including DDD, microfrontends and Backend-for-Frontend (BFF), while our infrastructure direction is standardizing around AWS, Terraform, GitHub Actions and ECS/Fargate. However, important decisions remain around areas such as gateways and routing, scalability, observability, resilience, deployment architecture, and how existing systems should progressively move towards the target state.\n\nYour primary responsibility will be to consolidate this direction into a coherent infrastructure and reliability architecture and define a pragmatic path for its adoption.\n\nYou will operate between Enterprise Architecture and SRE and engineering teams, translating broader architectural direction into practical patterns, standards, reference implementations, and modernisation strategies.\n\nThis is a hands-on Principal level individual contributor role with significant technical influence across infrastructure. You will be expected to challenge existing decisions where appropriate, validate important architectural choices through proofs of concept and reference implementations, and provide the technical direction that enables engineering teams to implement and adopt the target architecture successfully.\n\nWhat you'll work on\n\nInfrastructure modernisation & target architecture\nDefine and evolve the target infrastructure and reliability architecture.\nConsolidate architectural decisions already underway into a coherent, scalable, and maintainable target state.\nDefine pragmatic modernisation strategies for existing systems, balancing business value, technical risk, cost, and migration effort.\nAssess systems and recommend whether they should be incrementally modernised, aligned with the target architecture, temporarily retained, or eventually replaced.\nDefine transition patterns that allow teams to modernise without unnecessary large-scale rewrites.\nEstablish the target architecture and infrastructure patterns as the default for new modules.\nIdentify architectural gaps, risks, and cross-system dependencies across the landscape.\nAWS cloud & platform architecture\nDefine scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-conscious architectures using AWS.\nDefine approaches to service-to-service communication, external API exposure, routing, and gateway strategy.\nDefine appropriate environment, networking, and deployment strategies for services.\nWork closely with security and enterprise platform teams to ensure alignment with Pearson-wide standards.\nInfrastructure as Code & CI/CD\nEstablish Infrastructure as Code standards using Terraform, including reusable patterns, modules, and conventions that engineering teams can adopt consistently.\nShape CI/CD architecture using GitHub and GitHub Actions as the standard delivery platform.\nDefine reusable deployment patterns and approaches to environment promotion, rollback, and safe releases.\nReduce infrastructure and CI/CD divergence between engineering teams through reusable standards and automation.\nReliability, observability & production readiness\nShape and evolve wide approaches to reliability, resilience, observability, and production readiness.\nShape standards for metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting across distributed systems.\nHelp establish meaningful SLIs, SLOs, and reliability targets where appropriate.\nGuide architectural approaches to disaster recovery, failure handling, backups, and recovery strategies.\nHelp teams design systems that remain operable and cost-effective as usage and complexity grow.\nArchitecture standards & AI-enabled engineering\nTranslate infrastructure and SRE architecture decisions into reusable standards, reference implementations, Terraform patterns, and CI/Principal practices that teams can apply.\nCollaborate with teams evolving AI-enabled engineering framework so agreed infrastructure patterns and guardrails can be integrated into engineering workflows.\nCreate clear architecture decision records, reference architectures, and implementation guidance that teams can apply.\nTechnical leadership\nAct as a senior technical authority for SRE and infrastructure architecture.\nBridge the gap between Enterprise Architects and the SRE and engineering teams responsible for implementation.\nValidate important architectural decisions through proofs of concept and reference implementations.\nReview major infrastructure designs and provide technical direction across teams.\nMentor senior engineers, Tech Leads, and SREs and help drive alignment on cross-team technical decisions.\nRequired Skills & experience\nExtensive professional experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.\nProven experience operating at SRE Architect / Principal Engineer or equivalent senior technical leadership level.\nStrong track record defining cloud and infrastructure architecture across multiple teams or services.\nExperience leading or shaping modernisation across technology estates containing both legacy and modern systems.\nAbility to define a target architecture while defining realistic incremental migration paths.\nStrong architectural judgment and the ability to balance technical quality, delivery speed, risk, cost, and organisational constraints.\nAbility to create prototypes or reference implementations to validate architectural decisions.\nExperience with AWS and cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, Lambda, SQS, S3, DynamoDB, etc.\nExperience with infrastructure automation and platform engineering practices.\nExperience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, etc.\nExperience with infrastructure security, including IAM, network security, and data security.\nExperience with infrastructure cost optimization or FinOps practices.\nExperience defining architecture patterns, paved paths, or technical standards across autonomous teams.\nExperience working in EdTech, digital learning, or large global technology organisation.