Principal Platform Engineer – AI-Driven Content & Migrations

Pearson; Trenton (NJ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual incentive program

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform into a set of shared services. You will lead hands-on as a principal engineer shaping target designs, migrating large volumes of content, and delivering reusable capabilities with APIs.

You’ll own technical plans across tracks and serve as the technical point of contact for high-impact incidents. You'll work across teams and partners to ensure security, reliability, and scalable architecture, guiding others while balancing speed, learning, and

Qualifications

• Over 12 years building and operating production software, including 4+ years at staff/principal level or as technical lead across multiple teams or a large multi-service system.
• 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 in Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, and React, with MongoDB and event-driven services behind APIs.
• Production AWS experience (ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, API Gateway) with observability, CI/CD, and IaC.
• Clear design documents and migration plans; able to explain tradeoffs to engineering, product, and exec audiences.

Responsibilities

• Write production code where risk is highest and review the hardest changes.
• Unblock hard technical problems spanning systems, teams, or domains.
• Collaborate with engineering managers, product managers, architects, and QA; balance long-term initiatives with current delivery.
• Work with users of the platform across Pearson’s business lines to separate foundational problems from incremental ones.
• Spot cross-team opportunities and drive them from exploration to launch and iteration.
• Make high-consequence technical decisions under ambiguity with a bias toward scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Evaluate frameworks, tools, and vendors; pilot practices like contract testing and zero-downtime migrations.
• Run feasibility reviews for new AI capabilities and collaborate with internal and external partners.

Skills

Technical leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Solution design

Architectural judgment

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

MongoDB

Kafka

SQS/SNS

API Gateway

AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3)

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform into a set of shared services. You will lead hands-on as a principal engineer shaping target designs, migrating large volumes of content, and delivering reusable capabilities with APIs.

You’ll own technical plans across tracks and serve as the technical point of contact for high-impact incidents. You'll work across teams and partners to ensure security, reliability, and scalable architecture, guiding others while balancing speed, learning, and