Remote Senior Backend Architect & Platform Lead

Pearson (old); Salem (OR); Remote; USD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to lead backend design and production operations for scalable, cloud-native solutions. You will own end-to-end delivery, guiding distributed systems and event-driven architectures across global teams.

You will collaborate with product, architecture, and security to ensure reliable, observable, and secure services. This role emphasizes modernization, debt reduction, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant backend design, development, and operations experience.
• Proven experience as a technical lead or senior engineer for complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• Deep knowledge of backend concepts: distributed systems, Scalability, fault tolerance, event processing, and performance.
• Strong programming experience with Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing microservices, REST APIs, asynchronous workflows, and event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support of complex software systems.
• Build scalable backend services, distributed systems, event-driven apps, and streaming solutions on AWS.
• Own major engineering initiatives from discovery through delivery and production rollout.
• Balance new features with modernization, reliability, and maintenance of existing systems.
• Mentor engineers, provide technical guidance, code reviews, and best-practice adoption.
• Produce architecture decisions, runbooks, and clear technical documentation.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud-native software

APIs & microservices

AWS expertise

Security & observability

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in CS/SE/IT

Tools

AWS (Lambda, ECS/EKS)

API Gateway

DynamoDB

RDS/Aurora

MSK/Kafka

CloudWatch

IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)

Job description

Pearson is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to lead backend design and production operations for scalable, cloud-native solutions. You will own end-to-end delivery, guiding distributed systems and event-driven architectures across global teams.

You will collaborate with product, architecture, and security to ensure reliable, observable, and secure services. This role emphasizes modernization, debt reduction, and long-term maintainability.