Developer II (12-month Contract)

As the largest Canadian-owned and operated K-12 publisher, Nelson Education Ltd. is Canada's only heritage education content provider, known for its innovative products and solutions catering to learners across the country.

Nelson is on a mission to make learning accessible, engaging, and effective for all. That's why Nelson continuously strives to create dynamic curriculum-aligned content that caters to diverse learning styles, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and life-long learning.

In response to the evolving education landscape, Nelson developed Edwin, a digital learning ecosystem. Edwin is a learning platform for classroom success, providing curriculum-linked content, engaging tools and unparalleled support to reach every student.

Nelson is redefining education and making a positive impact on the way knowledge is acquired and shared by creating the possible, one learner at a time.

About the Role

Reporting to the Team Lead, the Developer II (Infrastructure & Security) is responsible for designing, securing, and operating the platform infrastructure that supports internal applications, services, and data pipelines. The person in this position leads on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes-based environments, CI/CD platform reliability, observability, and secure systems engineering — while contributing to application-layer development where needed to support operational ownership of services. This role combines software development with DevOps-oriented responsibilities, including CI/CD, observability, Kubernetes-based deployments, logging, monitoring, and operational support.

Key Accountabilities

• Design, provision, and maintain cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes environments, networking, and platform services using infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Helm).
• Own and operate CI/CD pipelines, automated build and deployment workflows, and release processes with a focus on reliability, security, and repeatability.
• Lead the configuration, deployment, and monitoring of containerized applications in Kubernetes, including manifests, Helm charts, ingress, services, secrets, and config maps.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure using Elastic Stack / ELK — including logging pipelines, dashboards, alerting, and log-based troubleshooting workflows.
• Drive application performance monitoring, alerting, and production-readiness practices across owned services.
• Lead secure software development practices: secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, sealed secrets), access control, environment configuration, and dependency/vulnerability scanning (SCA, SAST, DAST).
• Apply and enforce secure coding standards for common risks (OWASP Top 10), including input validation, authentication and authorization (OAuth, JWT, RBAC), and safe handling of sensitive data.
• Participate in security reviews, threat modelling discussions, and remediation of identified vulnerabilities.
• Support compliance engineering efforts related to frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, or HIPAA — including evidence collection, control implementation, and audit readiness.
• Manage database operations: schema migrations, indexing, performance tuning, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Lead incident response, on-call rotations, and post-incident reviews for production issues.
• Maintain infrastructure-as-code, environment hygiene, and operational runbooks for owned services.
• Contribute to backend application development (APIs, services, data pipelines) to support full operational ownership of platform components.
• Participate in code reviews with a security and reliability lens, and contribute to shared engineering standards.
• Stay current with cloud-native infrastructure, DevSecOps practices, and platform engineering tooling.
• Actively participate in the SCRUM process.

Requirements

Must have

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with several of the following:
• Cloud infrastructure on at least one major provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, load balancers, ingress)
• Kubernetes: deploying, operating, and troubleshooting applications in Kubernetes-based environments
• Infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or similar
• CI/CD pipelines, automated builds, and deployment workflows
• Elastic Stack / ELK: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and related observability tooling
• Secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, sealed secrets) and dependency/vulnerability scanning
• Secure software development practices: OWASP Top 10, OAuth, JWT, RBAC
• Docker and containerization
• Application logging, monitoring, alerting, and production troubleshooting
• Database operations: schema migrations, indexing, and basic performance tuning
• Linux/shell fluency and comfort with on-call or production support responsibilities
• Experience with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA) and the engineering practices required to support them
• Experience with backup, disaster recovery, and cost/capacity awareness in cloud environments
• Backend development experience (TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Express, Golang, or similar) sufficient to own services end-to-end
• Experience with REST APIs, service-to-service integrations, and RDBMS/NoSQL databases
• Git and standard development tooling

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with data pipelines, background jobs, queues, or event-driven systems
• Experience building or maintaining observability dashboards, alerts, and log-based troubleshooting workflows
• Exposure to SAST, DAST, or SCA tooling and vulnerability remediation workflows
• Familiarity with frontend frameworks (React, Next.js) — helpful but not required
• Strong communication skills and ability to work across software development and infrastructure teams

Benefits

Compensation

The base salary range for this contract full-time position begins at $95,000+ per annum based on experience. Compensation is part of our broader Total Rewards package, which includes benefits and programs that support employee well-being and growth.

What We Offer

At Nelson, we believe in taking care of our people.

Your well-being, growth, and work-life balance matter to us, which is why we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you - professionally and personally.

The below benefits apply to this temporary contract position:

• This role is primarily on-site with some hybrid flexibility, M-F, standard business hours
• Commuter friendly location (Sheppard & Don Mills)
• Free parking on-site
• Free, convenient shuttle bus service from Don Mills Subway Station to and from the office
• Access to on-site fitness center and fitness classes
• Access to LinkedIn Learning for continuous skill growth
• Mentorship and professional development opportunities
• A comprehensive Employee Assistance Program (EAP) providing confidential support spanning from mental health services to financial counselling, and many things in-between.
  

Don't have 100% of the above qualifications? Do you still think Nelson is a great fit for you? We encourage you to apply anyway!

Our EDI Statement

Nelson teaches the world by learning from everyone in it.

We are committed to fostering an equitable, diverse, and inclusive workplace environment. This is an integral part of our company’s culture and mission that aligns with our four key pillars of Employee Diversity, Developing Authentic and Accurate Content, Amplifying External Voices, and Supporting the Local Community and Beyond.

We believe in the power of education and our ability to impact social change. Truth, honesty, integrity, and respect guide our decisions and actions in the development of learning solutions that empower success for all educators and learners.

We value a respectful, inclusive, and safe workplace that nurtures belonging and represents many different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives, and opinions. Everyone is free to be who they are.

We foster and continue to build relationships that are equitable, diverse, and inclusive with existing and future partners in education.

We commit to holding ourselves accountable by creating measurable short and long-term goals that place equity, diversity, and inclusion at the core of what we do in our resources, the workplace, the educational community, and in the larger society.

We strive to build an inclusive world for everyone. We are stronger together.

AI and Automated Hiring Tools

Nelson uses AI support tools in our applicant tracking system to help with tasks such as summarizing points and anonymizing applications. All candidate screening, assessments, and hiring decisions are done by people.

Interview Outcome Notification

Nelson is committed to keeping candidates informed. All candidates who attend an interview for a publicly advertised role will be notified of the outcome of their candidacy. Candidates will be notified of the hiring decision no later than 45 days after the last interview.

Our Commitment

Nelson is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to Inclusion, Equity and Diversity. As part of this commitment, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, colour, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status.

Should you require any accommodation during our recruitment and selection process, please reach out to peopleandengagement@nelson.com.