Platform Engineering Lead: Content & AI Systems

Pearson; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform into shared platform services. You will lead hands-on as a principal engineer, designing target systems and migrating large content and data safely across services.

You will own multi-track delivery, drive migrations, establish shared capabilities, and manage technical debt with a focus on security, reliability, and scalable AI-enabled workflows. The role demands strong leadership and deep full-stack skills.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software.
• Led a re-platforming or legacy migration of a production system with active users and data.
• Led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems.
• Upgraded or migrated production systems off an end-of-life runtime or framework.
• Full-stack depth: Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, React, MongoDB, and event-driven services.
• Production experience on AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, API Gateway) with observability (New Relic, CloudWatch), CI/CD (GitHub Actions), and Terraform.
• Writes clear design documents and migration plans and influences without authority.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent combination of education and experience.

Responsibilities

• Write production code where the risk is highest and review the hardest changes from other engineers.
• Unblock hard technical problems that span systems, teams, or domains.
• Work with engineering managers, product managers, architects, and quality engineering to balance tradeoffs.
• Collaborate with teams across Pearson's lines of business to solve foundational problems.
• Identify cross-team opportunities and drive initiatives from exploration through launch.
• Make high-consequence technical decisions under ambiguity for scalability and maintainability.
• Evaluate frameworks, tools, and vendors and pilot practices like contract testing and zero-downtime migration.
• Lead reviews and mentor engineers to raise technical standards across the platform.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

MongoDB

Event-driven

SQS/SNS/Kafka

AWS

CI/CD

Terraform

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

equivalent education/experience

Tools

OpenSearch

Solr

Redis

New Relic

CloudWatch

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform into shared platform services. You will lead hands-on as a principal engineer, designing target systems and migrating large content and data safely across services.

You will own multi-track delivery, drive migrations, establish shared capabilities, and manage technical debt with a focus on security, reliability, and scalable AI-enabled workflows. The role demands strong leadership and deep full-stack skills.