Platform Lead Engineer, Content & AI Services

Pearson; Lincoln (NE); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform with a hands-on principal engineer role. You will own the technical plan and delivery across tracks such as migrations and shared capabilities, from design through launch, with a strong focus on safety and data integrity.

You will write production code, unblock cross‑team issues, mentor engineers, and establish standards for reliability, observability, and AI-enabled workflows across Pearson’s content platforms.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software.
• 4+ years at staff or principal level, or as technical lead across several teams or a large multi‑service system.
• Led a re‑platforming or legacy migration of a production system with active users and data, through to switching off the old system.
• Full‑stack depth in our core stack: Java and Spring Boot, Node.js and TypeScript, and React, with MongoDB and event‑driven services (SQS, SNS, Kafka) behind APIs with many consumers.
• Production experience on AWS, especially ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, and API Gateway, with observability (New Relic, CloudWatch), CI/CD (GitHub Actions), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Writes clear design documents and migration plans, explains tradeoffs to engineering, product, and executive audiences, and influences without authority, especially when the decision carries real uncertainty.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or an 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 long‑term initiatives with current delivery.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Pearson's lines of business to separate foundational problems from incremental ones.
• Spot opportunities that cut across teams and carry work from exploration through launch and iteration.
• Make high‑consequence technical decisions under ambiguity, balancing speed, learning, scalability, and maintainability.
• Evaluate frameworks, tools, and vendors; pilot practices like contract testing and zero‑downtime migration.
• Run technical feasibility reviews for new AI capabilities and co‑develop with internal teams and partners.
• Use AI coding tools daily to upgrade and refactor at scale and help teams adopt them with sound review habits.
• Act as a technical multiplier: mentor engineers and raise the engineering practice level across teams.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD

Design docs

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

MongoDB

SQS

SNS

Kafka

OpenSearch

Redis

AWS ECS Fargate

Lambda

S3

API Gateway

New Relic

CloudWatch

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform with a hands-on principal engineer role. You will own the technical plan and delivery across tracks such as migrations and shared capabilities, from design through launch, with a strong focus on safety and data integrity.

You will write production code, unblock cross‑team issues, mentor engineers, and establish standards for reliability, observability, and AI-enabled workflows across Pearson’s content platforms.