Staff Software Engineer

We are seeking an experienced Sr. Full-Stack Engineer who can take ideas from prototype to production-ready releases for an initial cohort of customers, moving quickly while meeting baseline requirements required in a large enterprise environment.

You will play a key role in building end-to-end product capabilities across modern web experiences and cloud services, applying strong engineering judgment to deliver secure, solutions with lightweight architecture.You will also leverage the latest AI agents and developer toolsets to dramatically expedite product development, accelerating prototyping, implementation, testing, and iteration to deliver measurable customer outcomes.

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.

This is a primarily remote role, with occasional travel for in-person collaboration with colleagues and customers.

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.

• 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.