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Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, with over 40,000 people in more than 70 countries, helping people of all ages to make progress in their lives through all kinds of learning.

Pearson owns brands such as Financial Times, Penguin and Pearson Education with overall revenue of over $9.4 B in 2011.

We are Pearson Lanka, a core part of Pearson's global Learning Technologies team. We build and manage some of the industry leading cloud based learning platforms that serve millions of students across the world. Over the years, we have built a strong Agile Development team, and we are now looking to expand aggressively over the next 12 months.  The industry leading cloud-based technology platforms of Pearson help educate more than 30 million students across the globe.

The 300+ strong engineering team based out of the Colombo office works dedicatedly to service Pearson technology companies located in North America, Europe and Australia.

At Pearson, we aim to be the best company to work for in the world. It is part of our philosophy to provide benefits, profit share plans, development opportunities and a culture that beats anywhere else. If you are 'always learning', and have a passion for technology and creativity, send in your resume and join our exciting engineering culture.

JOB SUMMARY

Pearson  develops and operates web based learning and content delivery systems for higher education and curriculum use. Over seven million customers use these systems to enhance their learning experiences. This team helps to ensure 24/7/365 delivery of our hosted application products to its customers.
The Sr. Operations Engineer receives requests for problem escalation from product support staff, service alerts from monitoring systems, or reports from internal staff. The engineer determines the severity of issues (triage), prioritizes issues, performs diagnosis of system and software components to identify root cause, and takes or recommends corrective action for resolution.
Issue triage includes reproducing errors (product use, data issue, connectivity issue, and/or application malfunction), collecting detailed application and system information and, if necessary, escalating to database or application development staff.
Diagnosis includes checking monitoring systems, basic network and application health assessment, operating system level checks, examining application, database and system log files, exercising various applications, and examining system configuration and database contents.
Corrective action includes the use of application tools to correct configuration and deployment problems, restarting of services, updating application databases, processing incomplete transactions, thoroughly documenting issues and their resolution, and creating systems/software change requests using Tracking and Workflow tools, email and other office productivity tools.
The Sr. Operations Engineer is highly comfortable working with diverse web-based applications, particularly course or learning management systems.
The Sr. Operations Engineer communicates with product support staff and may occasionally communicate directly with sales staff and customers. The engineer will work with other Operations team members, systems and database administrators, software engineers/QA, technical product managers and vendors to clearly state problems, troubleshoot, diagnose and/or resolve complex technical issues. The engineer also works with product management teams to provide advice on critical enhancements for reliability of software and communicates details of product/platform releases to the Operations team.
This position requires participation in On-Call rotation

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Working with diverse web-based applications and learning management systems in a production, mission critical environment diagnosing complex user, application and/or systems problems
• Acquiring a deep understanding of the platform applications at the operational level to become the subject matter expert for other departments including product management, engineering, product support and others
• Responding to unplanned incidents and developing means to reduce downtime and minimize customer impact. This position requires participation in On-Call rotation
• Working with various teams to prepare for supporting new and/or highly integrated products and platforms
• Writing excellent documentation to enable other team members and to aid new hire training to easily learn and support our platforms
• Monitoring the daily operations of the enterprise application environment by analyzing information and recommending short and long term resolutions to issues including the creation and maintenance of scripts and automation tools

OTHER RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Working with external vendors to support systems as required
• Participating in disaster recovery / business continuity planning

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE:

• Ability to effectively multi-task on a variety of daily work assignments in a challenging, fast-paced work environment
• Excellent business communication, organizational and time management skills
• Experience with documentation of complex issues, processes, procedures
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to understand and clearly explain technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong team player with the ability to work independently
• Motivation to learn and share expertise of new skills and technologies
• Ability to resolve support issues are in a timely and efficient manner
• Knowledge of various computer systems (tools, services, software, etc.)
• Ability to work in Windows environment
• Ability to decipher detailed deployment plans
• Experience scheduling and preparing appropriate resources to participate in deployments
• Capacity to seek new opportunities based on business needs and company growth
• Creative problem solving skills
• 5+ years experience, BS in computer science or other technical discipline

MANDATORY SKILLS:

• Strong leadership skills 
• Experience with SQL query and understanding of relational database concepts
• Experience with a scripting language such as perl, python, bash, csh
• Ability to read and understand code in Java/J2EE, PHP, XML,.NET, or PHP
• Experience with web application architecture and distributed applications
• Experience with application-based JMS, Apache, Tomcat

BENEFICIAL SKILLS:

• Remote administration experience (ssh, vnc)
• Working knowledge of Linux and Solaris operating systems
• Previous experience with an enterprise service bus
• Oracle experience
• Familiarity with networking, systems administration

Please use the apply button below to send your application to us.