Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead - Cloud & Microservices

Pearson; Lansing (MI); On-site; USD 125,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking an senior software engineer to own end-to-end architectural decisions for scalable backend systems in a cloud-native, AWS-driven environment. You will lead design, implementation, and production support for distributed services, while mentoring teams across onshore and offshore locations.

The role emphasizes modernization, reliability, and long-term maintainability, with a strong focus on event-driven and streaming architectures, API design, and secure software practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent; master’s a plus.
• 7+ years in professional software engineering with backend focus.
• Experience as technical lead on complex cross-functional programs.
• Backend concepts: distributed systems, scalability, fault tolerance.
• Proficient in modern strongly-typed languages (Java/TypeScript/Go, etc).
• Designing microservices, RESTful APIs, event-driven & streaming systems.
• AWS and cloud-native engineering with multiple AWS services.
• Experience with relational, NoSQL, graph and streaming data tech.
• API design, security, data protection, and auth concepts.
• Automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and monitoring.
• Documentation, runbooks, and engineering best-practices.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment & production support.
• Build scalable backend services and distributed, event-driven apps.
• Lead major initiatives from discovery through delivery and support.
• Balance new features with modernization, reliability, and debt reduction.
• Collaborate across product, architecture, security, and ops teams.
• Develop and communicate technical proposals detailing decisions and trade-offs.
• Lead design reviews, system design discussions, and planning for complex projects.
• Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, and cloud-native services.
• Mentor engineers, perform code reviews, and promote best practices.
• Maintain production systems: monitoring, incident response, RCAs, performance.
• Stay current with cloud, AI, and engineering productivity trends.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Microservices design

RESTful APIs

Event-driven architectures

Cloud-native engineering

Strongly-typed languages

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Pearson is seeking an senior software engineer to own end-to-end architectural decisions for scalable backend systems in a cloud-native, AWS-driven environment. You will lead design, implementation, and production support for distributed services, while mentoring teams across onshore and offshore locations.

The role emphasizes modernization, reliability, and long-term maintainability, with a strong focus on event-driven and streaming architectures, API design, and secure software practices.