Staff Software Engineer

Pearson is a leading education company, and they are seeking an experienced Sr. Full-Stack Engineer. The role involves building end-to-end product capabilities across modern web experiences and cloud services, leveraging AI technology to expedite product development and ensure high-quality outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Build and ship end-to-end product experiences across modern web applications, owning delivery from early concept through production release and iteration
• Rapidly prototype new concepts, validate feasibility and user value, and graduate successful prototypes into secure, scalable, maintainable production services for the first set of customers
• Design and manage AI-powered capabilities across retrieval, context shaping, and personalization (RAG, context engineering, collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, etc.), balancing quality, safety, privacy, and latency
• Build or leverage API-first, versioned REST microservices that expose domain capabilities in a consistent, reliable way across experiences
• Apply AI agents and modern developer tooling to speed up development workflows, including scaffolding, code generation, evaluation, debugging, and test automation
• Establish engineering clarity and alignment through strong technical communication and documentation (e.g., architecture briefs, API specs, runbooks, decision records)
• Champion pragmatic software quality practices: code reviews, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, performance tuning, and cloud cost-aware design
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Research, Data Science, and customer-facing teams to translate needs into working software that meets business outcomes
• Ensure regulatory, compliance, security, and privacy expectations are met throughout development and release
• Independently create a test strategy (unit/integration/e2e) aligned to risk, including security testing
• Write architecture briefs and proposals (lightweight but clear), run experiments, and document tradeoffs
• Integrate telemetry for performance, reliability, availability, and usage insights
• Perform other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• 5-8 years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial ownership of full-stack web applications shipped to production
• Strong front-end engineering skills with modern JavaScript frameworks (React/Next.js preferred), UI frameworks (Tailwind, MUI, etc.), accessibility (WCAG 2.2), and scalable design systems
• Strong backend engineering skills building APIs and services, including REST API design, authentication/authorization, and versioning strategies spanning service frameworks (.NET, Node.js, Python), API styles (REST/GraphQL), and supporting systems (DynamoDB/SQL/MongoDB, Redis, SQS/SNS, Kafka)
• Hands-on expertise bootstrapping AWS, including designing, deploying, and operating production workloads (serverless and/or container-based), plus monitoring and cost controls
• Experience designing or working within microservices and API-first architectures, including service boundaries, contracts, and integration patterns
• Hands-on experience building, deploying, and operating services using containers (Docker) and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes or a managed equivalent), supported by CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar tooling)
• Applied experience building AI-enabled product features, including RAG or retrieval-based grounding approaches, with a mindset toward evaluation and quality measurement
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing strategy, code quality, system design, observability, reliability, and incident-minded thinking
• Strong problem-solving skills, including the ability to navigate complexity, assess tradeoffs, and execute with confidence in ambiguous environments
• Ability to collaborate across a large organization without direct authority, aligning stakeholders through clear communication and pragmatic technical leadership
• Practical experience applying AI-assisted development workflows, including agents/subagents and tools like Claude Code, Devin, Ralph, and Builder.io, to rapidly build, test, and refine product features
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience in EdTech, learning science-informed product development, or regulated/high-trust user experiences; ideally with Ed-Fi–aligned Data Services
• Experience with experimentation frameworks (feature flags, A/B testing) and product analytics to evaluate shipped work
• Experience with eCommerce and related analytics tools and platforms (Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Statsig, Grafana, etc.)
• Advanced degree or certifications (MBA or equivalent)