Principal Platform Engineer - Content Platform & AI

Pearson; City of Albany (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform and seeks a principal engineer to lead hands-on design and implementation across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services and cloud infrastructure.

You will own technical plans, drive migrations, and establish shared capabilities with strong API interfaces. The role requires deep systems thinking, leadership, and collaboration across Pearson’s lines of business.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software.
• 4+ years at staff or principal level or as technical lead across multiple teams.
• Led re-platforming or legacy migration of a production system with active users/data.
• Led design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems.
• Full-stack depth in Java/Spring Boot, Node.js/TypeScript, React; MongoDB; event-driven services.
• Production AWS experience (ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, API Gateway) with observability, CI/CD, and Terraform.
• Writes clear design documents and migration plans; can influence without authority.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical plan and delivery for multiple tracks from design to launch.
• Migrate large volumes of content/data with integrity for downstream products.
• Build shared platform capabilities exposed via clean APIs.
• Provide honest, costed views of technical debt and prioritization.
• Be the technical point of contact for incidents and outages.
• Define standards for design, tooling, reliability, observability, and AI workflows.
• Mentor engineers and raise the overall technical judgment of teams.
• Run feasibility reviews for new AI capabilities and partner with teams.

Skills

Staff leadership

Full-stack depth (Java/Spring Boot, TS

AWS production experience

Design & migration planning

Executive communication

AI capability assessment

Mentoring engineers

Security & reliability

Technical decision making underAmbigu

Platform strategy & roadmap

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

OpenSearch

Solr

Redis

Terraform

GitHub Actions

New Relic

CloudWatch

SQS/SNS/Kafka

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform and seeks a principal engineer to lead hands-on design and implementation across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services and cloud infrastructure.

You will own technical plans, drive migrations, and establish shared capabilities with strong API interfaces. The role requires deep systems thinking, leadership, and collaboration across Pearson’s lines of business.