Staff Software Engineer

• 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.

This role requires strong problem-solving skills and comfort operating in ambiguous spaces. You will be breaking down complex customer problems into short-cycle product experiments and learning quickly through feedback., * 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.

Ideal candidates would also have

• 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).

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.