You will be responsible for imagining, creating, and developing the next-generation of services (products) within Pearson’s network estate, covering our traditional data center fleet,  public and private cloud-based environments, and colo hosting facilities.  You will also provide support and guidance for the operation of the team’s existing products and services, which include enabling services such as DC WAN, connectivity, DNS, NTP, and remote access.  

A key component of this work will be the requirement to actively engage with stakeholders within Pearson’s various business units, at both technical and non-technical levels, eliciting requirements and feeding these into research and design efforts that deliver novel solutions to challenging technical problems.

Responsibilities

As part of the Global Network Services (GNS) team you will develop, deploy, and support Pearson’s proprietary hybrid-cloud platform and enabling services.  This will involve close engagement with its users to gather requests for enhancement (RFE), liaising with project managers to support large migrations to public cloud, support data hygiene improvement efforts and identifying & implementing improvements to automate repetitive tasks/reduce toil. Work closely with the GNS tools team to develop monitoring of Pearson’s global infrastructure estate, and use this data to develop insights used to highlight areas for further improvement/targeted development. Work closely with the team’s tech lead to convert business outcome-driven requirements into detailed technical designs, capable of being deployed using programmatic means and maintained in complex production environments. Generate opportunities for new products by performing R&D relating to new developments in network technology, engaging in product development to deploy proofs of concepts.  These will then be validated and further developed into production-ready products and services that can be provided to the wider business. Ac as Mentor for Pearson Network engineers and contractors providing technical guidance, support, and upskilling. Participate in On-call schedule to provide out of hours support for the PC&N team.

Skills / Qualifications

10+ years of relevant industry experience in a large-scale infrastructure environment, ideally a Cloud or Internet Service Provider. Cisco Routing & switching experience with specific emphasis on global-scale wide-area networks, BGP, and VPN overlays. Proven track record of product management/development, with an emphasis on networking services like software-defined networking (SDN), SDWAN etc. Experience with creation of service wrappers, catalogues would also be beneficial. In depth knowledge of key networking technologies (including but not limited to) such as routing protocols (BGP/EIGRP/OSPF), tunnelling/overlay technologies (DMVPN, IPSEC, GRE) and enabling services (DNS, NTP, LDAP, RADIUS, etc). Good breath of understanding related to the foundational principles of core networking, network security, virtualization technologies, public cloud platforms, and application delivery. Excellent programming skills are key, with the ability to write modular, maintainable code (preferably Python), experience refactoring and peer-reviewing code, and experience of building and working in development environments using deployment tooling/release methodologies.  Experience working with large datasets accessed through RESTful API or SOAP/xml formats would also be beneficial. Experience developing, building, and supporting code-driven infrastructure on public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and the extension of this code-driven methodology to traditional on-premises infrastructure. Recent experience of IaC frameworks such as Terraform & CloudFormation, and orchestration tools such as Rundeck and Ansible. Confident, critical thinking problem solver with excellent written and interpersonal skills; ability to make sound decisions under pressure with limited information, and a proven track record of being able to influence decision making at all levels. The ability to proactively research and locate the necessary tools and processes to identify troublesome trends as they develop; to analyze and monitor trends, and develop a long-term goals designed to resolve problems and prevent them from recurring.  In addition to this, maintaining high service levels for the user community of the team’s existing products, and establishing a method to easily compare the installation performance against established performance objectives.

Education/Certification 

Bachelor’s Degree – Software development, Computer Science, Engineering, Science, or equivalent experience. Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) or higher, or equivalent proven record of experience. Public Cloud certification is a bonus.