Principal Platform Engineer: AI-Driven, Scalable Migrations

Pearson; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform with a hands-on principal engineer leading delivery across large-scale initiatives. You will design target systems, migrate content and data, and create reusable platform capabilities via clean APIs to support multiple Pearson lines of business.

You will work across teams to balance speed, safety, and long-term maintainability, mentoring engineers and raising technical judgment. This is a deep hands-on role shaping Pearson’s platform future.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software, incl. 4+ years at staff/principal level or as technical lead across multiple teams.
• 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/framework.
• Full-stack depth in Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, React, MongoDB, and event-driven APIs.
• AWS production experience (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 communicates tradeoffs to stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical plan and delivery for multiple technology tracks from design to launch.
• Migrate large content/data volumes with verification for downstream systems.
• Develop shared capabilities across teams via clean APIs.
• Provide honest, costed views of technical debt and prioritize fixes.
• Serve as technical contact for incidents with business impact and drive root-cause fixes.
• Ensure security and stability through upgrades, vulnerability remediation, and disaster recovery.
• Define cross-team standards for design, tooling, reliability, and observability; evaluate AI workflows.
• Own long-term technical roadmap and become subject-matter expert for your area.
• Write production code in high-risk areas and unblock hard cross-team problems.
• Collaborate with managers, product teams, architects, and QA, balancing scope and timelines.
• Engage with platform users across Pearson’s lines of business to surface foundational vs incremental work.
• Identify cross-cutting opportunities and shepherd initiatives from discovery through launch.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

MongoDB

Event-driven services

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

SQS

SNS

Kafka

OpenSearch

Solr

Redis

CloudWatch

GitHub Actions

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform with a hands-on principal engineer leading delivery across large-scale initiatives. You will design target systems, migrate content and data, and create reusable platform capabilities via clean APIs to support multiple Pearson lines of business.

You will work across teams to balance speed, safety, and long-term maintainability, mentoring engineers and raising technical judgment. This is a deep hands-on role shaping Pearson’s platform future.