Principal DevOps Engineer
- Full-time
Company Description
When you join Turnitin, you'll be welcomed into a company that is a recognized innovator in the global education space. For over 25 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Over 21,000 academic institutions, publishers, and corporations use our services: Feedback Studio, Originality, Gradescope, ExamSoft, Similarity, and iThenticate.
Experience a remote-centric culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability in a way that best suits you, supported by a comprehensive package that prioritizes your overall well-being. Our diverse community of colleagues are all unified by a shared desire to make a difference in education.
Turnitin is a global organization with team members in over 35 countries including the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, and the Philippines.
Job Description
We are seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to serve as a technical leader within our DevOps organization.
This role partners closely with other senior technical leaders to translate strategic platform direction into reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly infrastructure capabilities. The Principal will lead the technical execution of platform initiatives, elevate engineering standards, and drive measurable improvements in reliability, cost efficiency, and delivery velocity.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You will design and implement platform capabilities across our serverless and Kubernetes environments, guide senior engineers, and influence engineering practices across teams.
Key Responsibilities and Outputs
Technical Leadership & Execution
- Partner with Architects to implement and operationalize platform strategy.
- Lead the technical design and delivery of platform capabilities across:
- Serverless-first AWS workloads
- Kubernetes (EKS) environments
- Break down large architectural initiatives into executable milestones.
- Guide platform implementation patterns and reusable modules.
Reliability & Operational Improvement
- Drive systemic improvements that reduce incident frequency and severity.
- Strengthen observability standards (logging, metrics, tracing).
- Support adoption of Product focused SRE frameworks across teams.
- Improve deployment safety, change management, and incident response practices.
Platform Evolution
- Improve CI/CD automation and deployment workflows.
- Contribute to Kubernetes cluster design evolution and networking patterns.
- Improve logging pipelines, cost visibility, tagging standards, and platform guardrails.
- Support platform modernization efforts with a focus on simplification and predictability.
Engineering Enablement
- Improve developer experience across platform offerings.
- Establish clear golden paths for deployment and monitoring.
- Contribute to DORA metric visibility and engineering performance improvements.
- Support responsible AI tooling adoption in our workflows.
Influence & Mentorship
- Mentor senior engineers and elevate platform engineering standards.
- Lead technical discussions and design reviews.
- Make tradeoffs visible and articulate technical risk clearly.
- Reinforce disciplined intake and prioritization practices to protect strategic capacity.
Qualifications
Experience
- 8–12+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering.
- Experience operating serverless and Kubernetes environments at scale.
- Proven track record improving reliability and reducing operational toil.
- Experience collaborating closely with multiple engineering teams.
Technical Expertise
- Strong AWS expertise (Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, VPC).
- Strong Kubernetes/EKS experience including networking and observability.
- Advanced Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred).
- Strong CI/CD pipeline design experience.
- Experience with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, OpenSearch, Prometheus/Grafana, CloudWatch).
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and reliability engineering.
Nice to Have
- Experience implementing DORA metrics.
- Experience supporting SRE models and incident reduction initiatives.
- Experience improving developer onboarding and platform UX.
- Experience writing tools in scripting languages such as Python, Node.js, or similar.
- Experience evaluating AI-assisted development tooling safely.
- Resourcefulness.
- Collaboration & Influencing
- Quality Focus.
Additional Information
Total Rewards @ Turnitin
Turnitin maintains a Total Rewards package that is competitive within the local job market. People tend to think about their Total Rewards monetarily — solely as regular pay plus bonus or commission. This is what they earn in exchange for what they do. However, Turnitin delivers more than just these components. Beyond the intrinsic rewards of unleashing your potential to positively impact global education, and thriving in an organization that is free of politics and full of humble, inclusive and collaborative teammates, the extrinsic rewards at Turnitin include generous time off and health and wellness programs that offer choice and flexibility and provide a safety net for the challenges that life presents from time to time. Experience a remote-centric culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability in a way that best suits you, supported by a comprehensive package that prioritizes your overall well-being.
Our Mission is to ensure the integrity of global education and meaningfully improve learning outcomes.
Our Values underpin everything we do.
- Customer Centric - We realize our mission to ensure integrity and improve learning outcomes by putting educators and learners at the center of everything we do.
- Passion for Learning - We seek out teammates that are constantly learning and growing and build a workplace which enables them to do so.
- Integrity - We believe integrity is the heartbeat of Turnitin. It shapes our products, the way we treat each other, and how we work with our customers and vendors.
- Action & Ownership - We have a bias toward action and empower teammates to make decisions.
- One Team - We strive to break down silos, collaborate effectively, and celebrate each other’s successes.
- Global Mindset - We respect local cultures and embrace diversity. We think globally and act locally to maximize our impact on education.
Global Benefits
- Remote First Culture
- Health Care Coverage*
- Education Reimbursement*
- Competitive Paid Time Off
- 4 Self-Care Days per year
- National Holidays*
- 2 Founder Days + Juneteenth Observed
- Paid Volunteer Time*
- Charitable contribution match*
- Monthly Wellness or Home Office Reimbursement/*
- Access to Modern Health (mental health platform)
- Parental Leave*
- Retirement Plan with match/contribution*
* varies by country
Seeing Beyond the Job Ad
At Turnitin, we recognize it’s unrealistic for candidates to fulfill 100% of the criteria in a job ad. We encourage you to apply if you meet the majority of the requirements because we know that skills evolve over time. If you’re willing to learn and evolve alongside us, join our team!
Turnitin, LLC is committed to the policy that all persons have equal access to its programs, facilities and employment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.