Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Director, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) & Security

About Learning Ally

Learning Ally is a leading nonprofit education solutions organization that transforms the lives of struggling learners through proven literacy solutions. Our mission is to radically change education, enabling students to succeed academically, build self-confidence, and thrive, regardless of background or learning difference. We work alongside educators to identify and address reading challenges early, offering scalable interventions and professional development to create inclusive and empowered learning environments.

Serving over 2.4 million students, 630,000 educators, and nearly 3,000 districts nationwide, we are dedicated to breaking the cycle of literacy inequity, especially for students of color, English Language Learners, those from low-income backgrounds, and students with learning disabilities.

Our Vision

A world where every learner, regardless of reading differences like dyslexia, can access information, acquire knowledge, achieve academic independence, and confidently reach their full potential.

Our Mission

We empower learners with reading differences, including dyslexia by providing innovative solutions and fostering meaningful partnerships.

Our Team

To drive this goal, we are building and expanding our next-generation platform to enable a new portfolio of products and services that address a student's cognitive, environmental, and literacy learning variables. Our goal is to create immersive digital learning experiences that help develop a student's love of reading and support an educator's understanding of their role in student success.

We use React on the front end and prefer Typescript in our codebase. Our apps and front ends talk to our GraphQL and REST APIs. We deploy via GitHub pipelines to Kubernetes on AWS. We are in the process of sunsetting legacy DNN / .NET / MS SQL Server platforms and adopting standards-based applications supplemented by SaaS platforms. We are not dogmatic, we believe in using the best tool for the job, and the job ends with the last user, not the first.

We look for teammates who think about platforms and products holistically and be an accelerator for the team to build new services and features that are reliable and maintainable. If you are humble, curious, resourceful, and will challenge us to think differently about solutions, this is an incredible opportunity to drive change in education and improve how millions of students learn.

Role Description

As the Director of SRE & Security for Learning Ally, you will lead and contribute to a DevOps and Cybersecurity team that provides platform engineering, site reliability, and performance analysis to our technology department. You will work alongside product engineering and other technology leaders; you will develop infrastructure roadmaps, and assist in the architecture and development of foundational learning, teaching, rostering, and administrative systems to support our growing portfolio of products focused on delivering value to educators and students.

Responsibilities

• Lead and manage engineering teams, contracted engineers, and subprocessing vendors to optimize performance and ensure high-quality output.
• Build solutions that are auto-scaling, self-healing, using automation & infrastructure as code (Terraform, Kubernetes, CloudFormation, autoscaling groups).
• Design and develop a vision for service oriented architecture in close concert with our engineering team (across Windows and Linux-based environments).
• Streamline software development by implementing reusable tooling for CI/CD pipelines and automating manual processes and associated developer and cybersecurity tooling (linting, SCAT/DCAT, unit testing, patch management, static analysis).
• Identify network and application performance bottlenecks and security weaknesses, propose and implement solutions.
• Maintain and continually improve an ISMS for regular ISO 27001 certification audits, assist CISO in oversight of Vanta-based compliance and cybersecurity program.
• Leverage best in industry practices to support web applications and data platforms.

Skills and Experience

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in the field of software engineering, operations, cloud operations, & solution architecture, including 2+ year leading a team.
• Strong experience and technical knowledge of cloud development (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Ability to efficiently work with large data sets, logs, analytics (DataDog, PowerBI, BigQuery).
• Experience with Terraform, Cloudformation, Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible/Chef or similar technologies.
• Build and maintain GitHub Actions / Jenkins CI and blue/green deployment pipelines.
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases like MySQL/MSSQL/PostgreSQL/MongoDB.
• Demonstrated ability to build "one-click" deployments.
• Experience in deploying applications in Unix environments, and familiarity with MS Windows IIS / SQL Server environments for legacy maintenance and migration.
• Security focused with a view of security embedded in the SDLC and each release.
• Education Technology experience preferred.
• Ability to work in the US.

Learning Ally is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.