Senior Backend Architect — Cloud-Native, Distributed Systems

Pearson; Hartford (CT); Remote; USD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own and build scalable backend systems in a distributed, cloud-native AWS environment. You will drive architecture, design, and production readiness while balancing modernization with reliability and feature delivery.

The role requires leadership across global teams, strong communication, and the ability to operate with limited oversight in a 24/7 production setting. Remote work options are available.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline. A master’s degree is a plus.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience designing, developing, and operating backend systems.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior engineer for complex, cross-functional software initiatives.
• Deep knowledge of backend engineering concepts, including distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency, consistency, event processing, and performance.
• Strong programming experience with at least one modern, strongly typed language, such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing and building microservices, RESTful APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven architectures, streaming systems, and integration services.
• Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native engineering, including several of the following: AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS or EKS, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon SQS and SNS, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon MSK, AWS Step Functions, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS or Aurora, Amazon Neptune, CloudWatch, IaC.
• Experience designing systems using serverless, containerized, microservice-based, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience working with relational, NoSQL, graph, and streaming data technologies, including data modeling, scalable access patterns, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of API design, system integration, authentication, authorization, application security, and data protection principles.
• Experience with automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with CI/CD practices.
• Experience implementing observability using structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and proactive alerting.
• Experience diagnosing complex production issues, root-cause analysis, and improving system reliability across distributed applications.
• Proven ability to create technical documentation, architecture diagrams, design proposals, operational runbooks, and engineering best-practice guidance.
• Experience building proof-of-concept solutions and evolving them into scalable, production-ready systems.
• Experience maintaining and modernizing mature software platforms with significant operational, support, and technical debt considerations.
• Experience working in Agile development environments and coordinating engineering delivery across globally distributed teams.
• Demonstrated ability to independently manage work, make informed technical decisions, navigate uncertainty, and drive initiatives through completion.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to engineering leaders, product partners, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operationalization, and production support of complex software systems.
• Build scalable, reliable, secure, and highly available backend services, distributed systems, event-driven applications, and stream-processing solutions.
• Own major engineering initiatives from technical discovery and solution definition through delivery, production rollout, and ongoing support.
• Balance the delivery of new product capabilities with modernization, technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and maintenance of existing systems.
• Partner with product, architecture, platform, security, operations, development, and other solution teams to translate business requirements into practical technical approaches.
• Develop and communicate technical proposals that clearly explain solution architecture, implementation decisions, expected outcomes, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
• Lead technical discovery sessions, architecture reviews, system design discussions, and implementation planning for complex initiatives.
• Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, streaming applications, and cloud-native services that can evolve with changing product and platform needs.
• Evaluate existing platform capabilities, shared services, and APIs before introducing new solutions, ensuring alignment with broader enterprise architecture.
• Create proof-of-concept solutions to validate technical approaches and evolve successful prototypes into secure, maintainable, and production-ready capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations, ensuring development activities are coordinated and delivered with high quality.
• Work independently, navigate ambiguity, identify the appropriate path forward, and drive initiatives to completion with limited oversight.
• Mentor engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, troubleshooting, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of engineering best practices.
• Establish and promote standards for code quality, automated testing, observability, resiliency, security, documentation, and operational readiness.
• Produce clear and maintainable technical documentation, including system designs, architecture decisions, workflows, operational runbooks, troubleshooting guidance, and engineering standards.
• Drive continuous improvement across software development, delivery, deployment, maintenance, and production support practices.
• Take ownership of production systems, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, performance optimization, and implementation of long-term corrective actions.
• Operate effectively in a 24/7 production environment and understand the responsibility associated with supporting business-critical software platforms.
• Stay current with advancements in cloud computing, distributed systems, software architecture, artificial intelligence, and engineering productivity.
• Evaluate and responsibly adopt AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities where they improve solution quality, developer productivity, operational efficiency, or customer outcomes.
• Contribute to an AI-native engineering culture by applying AI capabilities throughout appropriate stages of discovery, design, development, testing, documentation, deployment, and operational support.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

AWS cloud

Microservices

RESTful APIs

Event-driven

Automated testing

Observability

Technical leadership

Writing docs

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Master’s degree a plus

Tools

AWS Lambda

ECS/EKS

API Gateway

SQS/SNS

EventBridge

MSK

Step Functions

DynamoDB

RDS/Aurora

Neptune

CloudWatch

IaC

Serverless

Containers

Data modeling

Job description

Pearson is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own and build scalable backend systems in a distributed, cloud-native AWS environment. You will drive architecture, design, and production readiness while balancing modernization with reliability and feature delivery.

The role requires leadership across global teams, strong communication, and the ability to operate with limited oversight in a 24/7 production setting. Remote work options are available.