Principal Platform Engineer: AI, Migrations & Cloud

Pearson; Carson City (NV); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform and seeking a principal engineer to lead hands-on design and delivery across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services, and cloud infrastructure. You will drive migrations, shared capabilities, and strategic technical debt decisions while staying deeply involved in the code on critical paths.

You will work across Pearson’s platform with managers, architects, and quality engineers to define problems, tradeoffs, and solutions that scale, while

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software, including 4+ years at staff or principal level.
• 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, React, with MongoDB and event-driven services behind APIs with many consumers.
• Production experience on AWS (ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, API Gateway), with observability, CI/CD, and IaC.
• Writes clear design documents and migration plans and influences without authority.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical plan and delivery for several tracks from design through launch.
• Migrate large volumes of content and data with verification of integrity for downstream products.
• Build shared capabilities like media handling, search, rendering, or AI services exposed via APIs.
• Provide costed views of technical debt and priorities for fixes.
• Be the technical point of contact for escalated incidents and drive root-cause analysis and fixes.
• Ensure security and stability across applications, including upgrades, vulnerability remediation, and disaster recovery.
• Set and promote shared design patterns, tooling, reliability, observability, and performance standards, including safe AI workflows.
• Own the long-term technical roadmap and become the subject-matter expert for your area.
• Work across Pearson’s platform with managers, architects, and engineers to solve foundational and incremental problems.
• Mentor engineers and elevate the engineering practices to enable ownership of systems by leaders around you.

Skills

Technical leadership

System design

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentoring engineers

Decision making

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

MongoDB

SQS

SNS

Kafka

AWS

ECS Fargate

Lambda

S3

API Gateway

Terraform

New Relic

CloudWatch

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

OpenAI / AI tools

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform and seeking a principal engineer to lead hands-on design and delivery across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services, and cloud infrastructure. You will drive migrations, shared capabilities, and strategic technical debt decisions while staying deeply involved in the code on critical paths.

You will work across Pearson’s platform with managers, architects, and quality engineers to define problems, tradeoffs, and solutions that scale, while