Advanced Specialist, Software Engineering

The Role

As an Advanced Specialist in Software Engineering, you will serve as a senior technical owner and hands-on engineer responsible for designing, building, operating, and evolving scalable software solutions for complex business and engineering challenges.

This is a full-stack engineering role with a strong emphasis on backend development, distributed systems, event-driven and stream-processing systems, cloud-native architecture predominantly on AWS, and service reliability. You will lead significant engineering initiatives from initial discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, operationalization, and ongoing support.

The role is equally focused on developing new product capabilities and strengthening, maintaining, and operationalizing existing features. Given the maturity and lifecycle of the platform, you will work on modernization, technical debt reduction, production reliability, performance improvement, and long-term maintainability alongside new feature delivery.

You will work closely with product managers, architects, engineering leaders, and teams across multiple domains to translate business needs into practical, scalable, and maintainable technical solutions. Documentation, technical communication, and collaboration across globally distributed organizations are essential parts of this complex role.

The ideal candidate is an experienced engineer who thrives on solving difficult problems, operates effectively in ambiguous environments, and believes in owning solutions end to end. We are looking for a highly autonomous professional who can independently drive initiatives, establish clarity where requirements are incomplete, and remain accountable for delivering high-quality outcomes.

What You'll Own

• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operationalization, and production support of complex software systems.
• Build scalable, reliable, secure, and highly available backend services, distributed systems, event-driven applications, and stream-processing solutions.
• Own major engineering initiatives from technical discovery and solution definition through delivery, production rollout, and ongoing support.
• Balance the delivery of new product capabilities with modernization, technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and maintenance of existing systems.
• Partner with product, architecture, platform, security, operations, development, and other solution teams to translate business requirements into practical technical approaches.
• Develop and communicate technical proposals that clearly explain solution architecture, implementation decisions, expected outcomes, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
• Lead technical discovery sessions, architecture reviews, system design discussions, and implementation planning for complex initiatives.
• Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, streaming applications, and cloud-native services that can evolve with changing product and platform needs.
• Evaluate existing platform capabilities, shared services, and APIs before introducing new solutions, ensuring alignment with broader enterprise architecture.
• Create proof-of-concept solutions to validate technical approaches and evolve successful prototypes into secure, maintainable, and production-ready capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations, ensuring development activities are coordinated and delivered with high quality.
• Work independently, navigate ambiguity, identify the appropriate path forward, and drive initiatives to completion with limited oversight.
• Mentor engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, troubleshooting, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of engineering best practices.
• Establish and promote standards for code quality, automated testing, observability, resiliency, security, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Produce clear and maintainable technical documentation, including system designs, architecture decisions, workflows, operational runbooks, troubleshooting guidance, and engineering standards.
• Drive continuous improvement across software development, delivery, deployment, maintenance, and production support practices.
• Take ownership of production systems, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, performance optimization, and implementation of long-term corrective actions.
• Operate effectively in a 24/7 production environment and understand the responsibility associated with supporting business-critical software platforms.
• Stay current with advancements in cloud computing, distributed systems, software architecture, artificial intelligence, and engineering productivity.
• Evaluate and responsibly adopt AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities where they improve solution quality, developer productivity, operational efficiency, or customer outcomes.
• Contribute to an AI-native engineering culture by applying AI capabilities throughout appropriate stages of discovery, design, development, testing, documentation, deployment, and operational support.

About You

You are an experienced software engineer and technical leader who combines deep backend engineering knowledge with strong ownership, sound technical judgment, and effective communication.

You are highly autonomous and comfortable independently driving complex initiatives. You can navigate ambiguity, identify missing requirements, evaluate technical and business trade-offs, and establish a practical path toward delivery.

You are willing to take on difficult challenges and remain accountable throughout the entire lifecycle of a solution, from discovery and design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and production support.

You are equally comfortable developing new functionality and improving existing systems. You understand that mature products require continued investment in reliability, observability, performance, modernization, technical debt reduction, documentation, and operational excellence.

You work effectively across organizational and technical boundaries, influence decisions through expertise and collaboration, and explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Required Experience and Skills

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline. A master's degree is a plus.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience designing, developing, and operating backend systems.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior engineer for complex, cross-functional software initiatives.
• Deep knowledge of backend engineering concepts, including distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency, consistency, event processing, and performance.
• Strong programming experience with at least one modern, strongly typed language, such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing and building microservices, RESTful APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven architectures, streaming systems, and integration services.
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native engineering, including several of the following:
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon ECS or EKS
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon SQS and SNS
• Amazon EventBridge
• Amazon MSK
• AWS Step Functions
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon RDS or Aurora
• Amazon Neptune
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Infrastructure as Code
• Experience designing systems using serverless, containerized, microservice-based, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience working with relational, NoSQL, graph, and streaming data technologies, including data modeling, scalable access patterns, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of API design, system integration, authentication, authorization, application security, and data protection principles.
• Experience with automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with continuous integration and delivery practices.
• Experience implementing observability using structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and proactive alerting.
• Experience diagnosing complex production issues, conducting root-cause analysis, and improving system reliability across distributed applications.
• Proven ability to create technical documentation, architecture diagrams, design proposals, operational runbooks, and engineering best-practice guidance.
• Experience building proof-of-concept solutions and successfully evolving them into scalable, production-ready systems.
• Experience maintaining and modernizing mature software platforms with significant operational, support, and technical debt considerations.
• Experience working in Agile development environments and coordinating engineering delivery across globally distributed teams.
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage work, make informed technical decisions, navigate uncertainty, and drive initiatives through completion.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to engineering leaders, product partners, and business stakeholders.

AI and Modern Engineering Capabilities

• Demonstrated ability to use AI-assisted engineering tools to improve solution analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and developer productivity.
• Familiarity with agentic AI technologies, including AI agents, tool-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, model integration, and AI-enabled automation.
• Familiarity with the AI Development Lifecycle, or AI-DLC, including the responsible application of AI throughout discovery, design, development, validation, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means taking end-to-end ownership of complex engineering initiatives and consistently delivering secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions. You will successfully balance new feature development with the modernization, operational support, and continued improvement of existing capabilities. You will bring technical clarity to ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions, raise engineering standards, and help teams deliver with greater quality and confidence. Beyond writing code, you will ensure that solutions are well designed, thoroughly tested, observable, documented, operationally ready, and aligned with the long-term direction of the platform. You will also contribute to building a strong engineering culture by mentoring others, promoting collaboration, and responsibly adopting AI-assisted and agentic technologies where they create meaningful value.

Compensation at Pearson is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, and specific location. As required by the California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York State, New York City, Vermont, Washington State, and Washington DC laws, the pay range for this position is as follows:

The minimum full-time salary range is between $125,000 - $175,000.

This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.

Applications will be accepted through 15th August. This window may be extended depending on business needs.

Who we are:

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other group protected by law. We actively seek qualified candidates who are protected veterans and individuals with disabilities as defined under VEVRAA and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.

If you are an individual with a disability and are unable or limited in your ability to use or access our career site as a result of your disability, you may request reasonable accommodations by emailing

Job: Engineering

Job Family: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: Higher Education

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Workplace Type: Hybrid

Req ID: 25308