Senior Backend Architect — Cloud-Native, Scalable Systems

Pearson

Nashville (TN)

On-site

USD 125,000 - 175,000

Full time

2 days ago

Be an early applicant

Get a reply from this employer

Your resume and cover letter, tailored to exactly what they’re hiring for.

Get past ATS filters

Job summary

Pearson is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to own design, development, and operation of scalable backend systems on AWS. You will drive modernization, handle production reliability, and mentor teams across multiple domains to deliver high‑quality solutions.

The role emphasizes technically autonomous leadership, architecture oversight, and collaboration with product and security teams to implement reliable, secure software while reducing debt and improving observability.

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 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, Amazon CloudWatch, Infrastructure as Code.
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 production-ready systems.
Experience maintaining and modernizing mature software platforms with operational, support, and debt considerations.
Experience working in Agile 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 for 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 through delivery, production rollout, and ongoing support.
Balance new feature delivery with modernization, debt reduction, reliability improvements, and maintenance of existing systems.
Partner with product, architecture, platform, security, and operations teams to translate requirements into technical approaches.
Develop and communicate technical proposals detailing architecture, decisions, outcomes, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
Lead discovery sessions, architecture reviews, system design discussions, and planning for complex initiatives.
Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, event‑driven systems, streaming apps, and cloud‑native services.
Evaluate existing platform capabilities and APIs for alignment with enterprise architecture.
Create PoCs to validate approaches and evolve prototypes into production-ready capabilities.
Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations.
Work independently in ambiguity, driving initiatives to completion with limited oversight.
Mentor engineers through design guidance, reviews, troubleshooting, and best practices.