SRE Architect / Principal DevOps Engineer

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About Amdaris

About the role

We are looking for a highly experienced SRE Architect / Principal Devops Engineer to help lead the infrastructure and reliability architecture for the technology landscape as we accelerate our modernisation journey.

🎯 The Role

Our broader architectural direction is already taking shape, including DDD, microfrontends and Backend-for-Frontend (BFF), while our infrastructure direction is standardising 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 toward the target state.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the target infrastructure and reliability architecture.
• Consolidate architectural decisions already underway into a coherent, scalable, and maintainable target state.
• Define pragmatic modernisation strategies for existing systems, balancing business value, technical risk, cost, and migration effort.
• Assess systems and recommend whether they should be incrementally modernised, aligned with the target architecture, temporarily retained, or eventually replaced.
• Define transition patterns that allow teams to modernise without unnecessary large scale rewrites.
• Establish the target architecture and infrastructure patterns as the default for new modules.
• Identify architectural gaps, risks, and cross-system dependencies across landscape.
• Define scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-conscious architectures using AWS.
• Define approaches to service-to-service communication, external API exposure, routing, and gateway strategy.
• Guide architectural decisions around scalability, workload and capacity management, fault isolation, availability, and graceful degradation.
• Define appropriate environment, networking, and deployment strategies for services.
• Work closely with security and enterprise platform teams to ensure alignment with Pearson-wide standards.
• Establish Infrastructure as Code standards using Terraform, including reusable patterns, modules, and conventions that engineering teams can adopt consistently.
• Shape CI/CD architecture using GitHub and GitHub Actions as the standard delivery platform.
• Define reusable deployment patterns and approaches to environment promotion, rollback, and safe releases.
• Reduce infrastructure and CI/CD divergence between engineering teams through reusable standards and automation.
• Shape and evolve wide approaches to reliability, resilience, observability, and production readiness.
• Shape standards for metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting across distributed systems.
• Help establish meaningful SLIs, SLOs, and reliability targets where appropriate.
• Guide architectural approaches to disaster recovery, failure handling, backups, and recovery strategies.
• Help teams design systems that remain operable and cost-effective as usage and complexity grow.
• Translate infrastructure and SRE architecture decisions into reusable standards, reference implementations, Terraform patterns, and CI/CD practices.
• Collaborate with teams evolving AI enabled engineering framework so agreed infrastructure patterns and guardrails can be incorporated into engineering workflows.
• Create clear architecture decision records, reference architectures, and implementation guidance that teams can apply consistently.
• Act as a senior technical authority for SRE and infrastructure architecture.
• Operate as a bridge between Enterprise Architects and the SRE and engineering teams responsible for implementation.
• Validate important architectural decisions through proofs of concept and reference implementations where appropriate.
• Review major infrastructure designs and provide technical direction across teams.
• Mentor senior engineers, Tech Leads, and SREs and help drive alignment on cross-team technical decisions.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Extensive professional experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Strong track record defining cloud and infrastructure architecture across multiple teams or services.
• Experience leading or shaping modernisation across technology estates containing both legacy and modern systems.
• Ability to define a target architecture while creating realistic incremental migration paths toward it.
• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance technical quality, delivery speed, risk, cost, and organisational constraints.
• Strong technical depth and willingness to create prototypes or reference implementations when needed to validate architectural decisions.
• Deep expertise in AWS and cloud-native architecture.
• Strong experience designing and operating containerised workloads on AWS, particularly ECS/Fargate.
• Strong understanding of AWS networking, load balancing, routing, and secure connectivity.
• Experience designing scalable API, gateway, and ingress architectures.
• Strong experience with relational data platforms such as Amazon RDS/Aurora.
• Good understanding of event-driven and asynchronous architecture patterns.
• Strong experience with Terraform in production environments.
• Strong experience with GitHub and GitHub Actions, including reusable CI/CD workflows and deployment automation.
• Strong understanding of cloud native autoscaling, workload capacity management, and scaling strategies for containerised and event-driven systems.
• Strong understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles.
• Experience designing observability approaches for distributed production systems.
• Strong understanding of metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and production monitoring.
• Experience working with SLIs, SLOs, reliability targets, and production-readiness practices.
• Strong knowledge of resilience patterns, failure modes, scalability, and disaster recovery.
• Ability to reason about trade-offs between reliability, performance, complexity, and cost.
• Strong understanding of AWS security fundamentals, including IAM, secrets management, encryption, and secure infrastructure patterns.
• Ability to work effectively with specialist security teams and translate organisational requirements into practical engineering approaches.
• Strong technical leadership skills without relying on formal line-management authority.
• Ability to influence engineering direction across multiple teams and organisational boundaries.
• Comfortable challenging existing approaches constructively and explaining the trade-offs behind alternative solutions.
• Pragmatic approach to modernisation, with the judgment to distinguish valuable change from unnecessary technical churn.
• Excellent communication skills with engineers, Tech Leads, Engineering Managers, Enterprise Architects, and other stakeholders.
• Ability to turn ambiguous technical problems into clear decisions and actionable next steps.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with Backend-for-Frontend and microfrontend architectures.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and Kafka/MSK.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and modern observability platforms.
• Experience with progressive delivery approaches such as canary or blue/green deployments.
• Experience with cloud cost optimisation or FinOps practices.
• Experience defining architecture standards, paved roads, or engineering golden paths across multiple autonomous teams.
• Experience working in EdTech, digital learning, or another large global technology organisation.

🎁 Benefits

• Opportunities for certification and training
• Dual monitor setup and high-spec workstations
• English courses
• Gym allowance
• Medical Reimbursement
• Full salary covered up to 20 days of sickness
• Flexible working hours
• Loyalty scheme
• Team-building activities, special events and conferences
• UK/EU Travel opportunities
• Snacks and drinks in the office