Senior Backend Systems Architect Remote (AWS, Microservices)

Pearson; Phoenix (AZ); Remote; USD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to own and evolve scalable backend systems in a remote-friendly setup. You will lead technical discovery, drive architecture decisions, and deliver production-grade solutions across distributed teams.

You will work on cloud-native architectures using AWS, engage in modernization, and mentor engineers while ensuring reliability, observability, and high performance across the platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, IT, or related field.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering with backend systems experience.
• Experience as technical lead or senior engineer on complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• Strong knowledge of backend concepts: distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, resiliency, and performance.
• Proficiency in a modern language (Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, TypeScript).
• Experience designing microservices, RESTful APIs, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong AWS and cloud-native engineering expertise across multiple AWS services.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production support of complex systems.
• Build scalable backend services, distributed systems, event-driven apps, and streaming solutions.
• Own major initiatives from discovery to production rollout and ongoing support.
• Balance new features with modernization, debt reduction, reliability, and maintenance.
• Partner with product, architecture, and security teams to translate requirements into technical approaches.
• Develop and communicate architecture decisions, risks, and trade-offs.
• Lead architecture reviews and design discussions for complex initiatives.
• Design APIs, microservices, and cloud-native services that evolve with product needs.
• Evaluate existing capabilities and align with enterprise architecture.
• Create PoC solutions and evolve into production-ready capabilities.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across onshore and offshore teams.
• Drive code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
• Produce clear documentation: designs, runbooks, and engineering standards.
• Promote AI-assisted engineering where it adds value.
• Foster an AI-native engineering culture across the lifecycle.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

APIs and microservices

Event-driven architectures

Performance optimization

Observability

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Master’s degree (plus)

Tools

AWS Lambda

AWS ECS/EKS

API Gateway

SQS/SNS

EventBridge

MSK

DynamoDB

RDS/Aurora

Neptune

CloudWatch

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

Pearson is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to own and evolve scalable backend systems in a remote-friendly setup. You will lead technical discovery, drive architecture decisions, and deliver production-grade solutions across distributed teams.

You will work on cloud-native architectures using AWS, engage in modernization, and mentor engineers while ensuring reliability, observability, and high performance across the platform.