Staff DevOps Engineer at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) in IN

HMH is a learning technology company committed to delivering connected solutions that engage learners, empower educators and improve student outcomes. As a leading provider of K–12 core curriculum, supplemental and intervention solutions, and professional learning services, HMH partners with educators and school districts to uncover solutions that unlock students’ potential and extend teachers’ capabilities.

HMH serves more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries. For more information, visit http://www.hmhco.com

Technical Infrastructure

• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS EC2, Terraform Enterprise, Docker, Aurora, Kubernetes, ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana).
• Observability & Automation: Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, Telegraf, Apollo, GraphQL.
• Development Stack: Microservices architecture, Spring, Java, NodeJS, React, Express.js.
• Data & Storage: Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, Postgres, Oracle, MySQL, InfluxDB, Linux, GitHub.
• AI & Agentic Automation: AWS Bedrock LLMs, Agentic AI frameworks, AI-assisted platform engineering.

About the role

You will constantly be asking, what are the most important platform and infrastructure challenges we need to solve today that will improve the reliability, scalability, security, and developer experience of HMH's engineering organization.

• Define the technical vision and architecture for HMH's DevOps and platform engineering capabilities.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives spanning cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, security, and developer platforms.
• Drive AI-enhanced DevOps automation through autonomous agents and intelligent operational workflows.
• Partner with Engineering, Architecture, Security, SRE, and Product teams to establish reusable platform capabilities and engineering standards.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and influence long-term technology strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Define reusable platform patterns, golden paths, and self-service developer capabilities.
• Own architecture decisions for Infrastructure patterns, CI/CD, Kubernetes platforms, observability, secrets management, and cloud governance.
• Drive improvements in reliability, scalability, resiliency, security, and cloud cost optimization.
• Lead major production incident reviews and drive long-term architectural improvements.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams.
• Establish engineering standards, best practices, and reference architectures.
• Design and implement AI-enabled operational workflows using AWS Bedrock and agentic technologies.

Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of hands-on DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering experience in Agile environments.
• Expert knowledge of AWS architecture and cloud-native design patterns.
• Deep expertise with Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD platforms.
• Experience designing highly available, large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong expertise with observability platforms including Datadog, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Strong understanding of networking, IAM, cloud security, secrets management, and governance.
• Proven ability to influence engineering organizations without formal authority.
• Excellent communication, architecture, and mentoring skills.

Preferred Skills and Interests

• Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms.
• GitHub Actions platform architecture and developer experience.
• AWS Bedrock, Agentic AI, and AI-assisted software delivery.
• OpenTelemetry, FinOps, Policy as Code, and Chaos Engineering.
• Experience leading organization-wide technical transformation initiatives.

The Information Technology organization is transforming to realize our mission: Become a leader in HMH’s digital transformation, and as a strategic partner, innovate and deliver highest value, competitive advantage solutions across all corporate and business functions. Our ambition is to be a digital leader through innovation and develop and deliver leading edge technology such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to solve some of HMH’s greatest operational business challenges. Our professionals will have business relevant skills to connect our HMH partners to technologies that propel the businesses to deliver the greatest value for HMH and our customers.

We are building a team of IT professionals with an insatiable appetite to learn, a relentless focus on customer service, a technological curiosity toward future possibilities, and a creativity in solving business challenges with leading technologies. Our team will find ways to work together, create a sense of community where it’s safe to take risks and learn together, develop our careers, and all have an opportunity to work on new technologies. We will work together, learn together and have fun together. As a team, we will lead HMH’s digital transformation.