Senior Platform Engineer – Lead Core Services & Migrations

Pearson; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is modernizing its content platform, and you will lead hands-on engineering across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services, and cloud infra. You will own designs and critical path code, driving large migrations and shared platform capabilities.

The role blends technical leadership with practical execution, requiring deep product and system thinking. A senior engineer with 12+ years in production systems is expected to guide teams and deliver robust, scalable solutions.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building and operating production software, including 4+ years at staff or principal level, or as technical lead across several teams or a large multi-service system.
• Led a re-platforming or legacy migration of a production system with active users and data, through to switching off the old system.
• Led the design and delivery of technically complex, user-facing systems.
• Upgraded or migrated production systems off an end-of-life runtime or framework.
• Full-stack depth in our core stack: Java and Spring Boot, Node.js and TypeScript, and React, with MongoDB and event-driven services (SQS, SNS, Kafka) behind APIs with many consumers.
• Production experience on AWS, especially ECS Fargate, Lambda, S3, and API Gateway, with observability (New Relic, CloudWatch), CI/CD (GitHub Actions), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Writes clear design documents and migration plans, explains tradeoffs to engineering, product, and executive audiences, and influences without authority, especially when the decision carries real uncertainty. We will ask you to walk us through a document you wrote.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical plan and delivery for multiple tracks from design through launch.
• Migrate large volumes of content and data with verification for downstream products.
• Build shared capabilities exposed via clean APIs (media handling, search, AI content services).
• Provide costed views of technical debt and prioritize fixes.
• Serve as the technical point of contact during escalated incidents with root-ccause fixes.
• Ensure security and stability including upgrades, vulnerability remediation, and disaster recovery planning.
• Develop and promote design patterns, tooling, reliability, observability, and AI-safe workflows.
• Maintain the long-term technical roadmap for your area.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Node.js

TypeScript

React

MongoDB

Event-driven services

AWS

ECS Fargate

Lambda

S3

API Gateway

Terraform

CI/CD

Observability

Code reviews

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

OpenSearch

Solr

Redis

GitHub Actions

Terraform

New Relic

CloudWatch

Job description

Pearson is modernizing its content platform, and you will lead hands-on engineering across UI, workflow orchestration, AI, backend services, and cloud infra. You will own designs and critical path code, driving large migrations and shared platform capabilities.

The role blends technical leadership with practical execution, requiring deep product and system thinking. A senior engineer with 12+ years in production systems is expected to guide teams and deliver robust, scalable solutions.