DevOps Engineer

Would you like to help enrich the lives of learners around the world?

At RM, we’ve been pioneers of education technology since 1973. We provide technology and resources to the education sector, supporting over 10 million students worldwide. We work with over28,000 schools, nurseries, and education trusts in 115 countries to deliver customer-centric solutions that improve education outcomes.

What we do helps learners at all stages of their lives, from preschool to higher education and professional qualification; we partner with schools, examination boards, central governments and other professional institutions to enrich the lives of learners.

RM Group operates through three businesses: Technology (Managed Services, Software and Infrastructure for Schools), Assessment (Software and Services) and TTS (Educational Resources).

Within the assessment market we are experts in providing solutions for online exam testing and marking and the management and analysis of educational data. We work with government ministries, exam boards and professional awarding bodies for high stakes assessment such as GCSEs, A Levels, and professional qualifications. Each year, our software is used globally to conduct hundreds of thousands of on-screen tests and to mark millions of paper-based scripts. For over a decade we have been partnering with the world’s leading awarding bodies to deliver intuitive, secure, and reliable e-marking solutions.

Visit our website to find out more: www.rm.com/assessment

The Platform Engineering (PE) team focuses on RM Assessment’s e-assessment software products. Based in our offices across the UK, India and Australia, the team is responsible for designing, developing, maintaining, and optimising the infrastructure platforms underpinning Assessment’s product portfolio.

Reporting to the PE UK Team Lead, the Platform Engineer will work in a team that is responsible for continuously optimising Assessment’s infrastructure platforms, ensuring that costs are accurately captured and optimised, and that the infrastructure platforms meet business needs, are scalable and secure, and maintain high levels of availability.

You will join an existing team of engineers in the UK and be part of the wider Technical Operations and Platform Engineering teams made up of around eighty engineers based in India, Australia and the UK. Working with Customer Support teams, Technical Architects and Application Developers you will play a crucial role in the evolution of our product portfolio into truly large-scale, high-margin, secure and reliable digital assessment and e-marking services for our customers.

This role may require flexible working patterns to cover periods of extended working hours which may include up to 10pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 5pm Saturdays and Sundays, should the need arise.

Responsibilities

• Provide ongoing support of the infrastructure underlying RM Assessment’s products and services, providing 4th line support for escalated support tickets and requests. Identify root cause issues (and fixes if possible) and work with the development team to drive product improvements.
• Work with technical architects, development leads and project teams to ensure changes to infrastructure and processes align with best practice and with a customer-led focus. Champion the adoption of DevOps processes and new technologies that simplify and enhance our operation.
• Continual Service Improvement – Ensure that the tools, products and skills associated with hosting and service delivery are constantly challenged and updated. Research industry best practice and contribute to the CSI programme within Technical Operations team.
• Represent Technical Operations in other CSI programmes and provide technical assistance and guidance as required.
• Team Support & Knowledge Transfer
• Drive knowledge development throughout the team to ensure that operational knowledge and skills are spread throughout the team.

This team sits in a department of over 80 heads across TOps and PE in all regions. TOps and PE support 40 live customers across e-marking and e-assessment, with an ambitious growth plan.

A Platform Engineer will be expected to work closely with internal customers at all levels within the organisation who develop, support or maintain the hosted applications.

The engineer will have a direct impact on RM’s customers through enhanced system performance and reliability. This role does not involve budget or cost management or line management.

Experience

Essential:

• Time management skills: ability to understand business impact and prioritise tasks accordingly.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills, a highly personable, engaging approach and a strong alignment to RM's core values: Customer success, high standards, respect for others, innovation, openness and enjoyment at work.
• Proven problem-solving skills: ability undertake complex root cause analysis and create customer facing and internal reports and recommendations.
• Strong working knowledge of core AWS services (including EC2, ECS, RDS, CloudFront) and/or core Azure services (including Windows VMs/IIS, AKS, SQL).
• Good working knowledge of network configuration in AWS and/or Azure.
• Good working knowledge of following products: Gitlab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, Docker, Terraform, Bash, Packer, Ansible.
• Experience using and maintaining Terraform/Ansible scripts for build/deploy of AWS and/or Azure environments,

Desirable:

• Demonstrable Customer Service skills, and ability to act as escalation point.
• Experience of supporting internal and client-facing cloud-hosted applications.
• Experience of supporting production-grade environments in AWS and/or Azure.
• Experience of supporting Microsoft SQL and/or Postgres databases and writing complex queries.

What’s in it for you?

At RM we have My Work Blend @RM which provides office-based colleagues with multi location and hybrid working options. As well as your office base, you can spend a proportion of your time working at other locations that suit your role and your life, including home, other offices, customer sites, distribution centres or on the move. We encourage you to discuss arrangements for this role with your potential line manager during the recruitment process.

As well as a competitive salary and our core benefits package which includes private medical healthcare, life assurance and a Group Personal Pension Plan with higher contribution levels available, some roles are also eligible for a performance-related bonus. There are lots of voluntary benefits too. You could buy additional annual leave, join our dental plan, sign up for a health assessment, or take part in our cycle to work scheme. You could even earn yourself an extra bonus for successfully recommending a friend or family member for a position within RM.

To better reflect the society that we serve, we’re committed to building a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all. To achieve this, we create teams of talented people from different backgrounds and experiences and strive to be a business where our people can bring their whole selves to work, we also want to make the recruitment process as inclusive as possible for everyone. Should you require additional support with your application or through the interview process, please contact us at recruitment@rm.com.

Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.