[Hiring] Principal, Enterprise Architect @Pearson

Role Description

Pearson Virtual Schools operates learning platforms that serve schools, teachers, and students at enterprise scale, and we are actively rebuilding parts of our technology foundation to be more resilient, secure, and cloud-native. This work sits at the intersection of high-velocity product delivery and the governance expectations of a large, regulated enterprise.

As our Principal Enterprise Architect, you lead transformative architectural initiatives for our core platforms, orchestrating large-scale changes that improve performance, security, and interoperability. You balance strategic planning with hands-on technical execution:

• Guiding teams through detailed designs
• Leading complex integrations
• Reducing legacy dependencies and technical risk

Your influence extends to cross-functional steering committees and project boards, where your technical judgment shapes the prioritization of multi-year platform investments. This is not an ivory-tower architecture role; you will spend real time on designs, code, and incident retrospectives alongside engineering teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated progression into enterprise-scale architecture roles.
• Significant tenure at fast-growing, internet-based startups, with firsthand experience building under constraints, scaling rapidly, and making pragmatic trade-offs.
• Proven track record modernizing legacy, on-premise, or monolithic enterprise systems into cloud-native architectures.
• Deep expertise with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and the foundational patterns that make cloud services resilient and cost-effective.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven and asynchronous integration: message brokers, event streams (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS EventBridge), and saga patterns for distributed transactions.
• Strong discipline in API-first design (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) as the contract layer between services.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, serverless container environments) at production scale.
• Familiarity with agentic workflows, background/autonomous processing, and modern AI/LLM orchestration patterns.
• Exceptional communication skills, comfortable pitching architectural vision to executive stakeholders and debugging distributed-systems issues with senior engineers in the same week.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent; advanced degree a plus.
• EdTech, SaaS, or K-12 platform experience a plus, not required.

Requirements

• Define the north-star technical architecture for PVS's core platforms, aligning business strategy with modern, sustainable cloud topologies.
• Lead the migration and refactoring of legacy, monolithic, or on-premise systems into decoupled, cloud-native architectures.
• Own multi-year modernization roadmaps that balance pragmatic delivery with long-term platform health, sequencing initiatives for measurable reductions in legacy dependencies.
• Present architectural strategy and trade-offs to cross-functional steering committees and project boards, driving alignment and prioritization on platform investment.
• Design systems for elastic, demand-driven scaling, including workloads that scale to zero when idle and scale out based on real-time queue depth.
• Architect loosely coupled, event-driven integrations using message brokers and event streams, applying saga patterns to manage complex distributed transactions.
• Establish API-first design discipline across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL contracts so services integrate cleanly and predictably.
• Guide adoption of agentic and autonomous processing patterns, including background workers, self-healing units, and AI/LLM orchestration, where they solve real platform problems.
• Define, document, and champion architectural patterns and guardrails across engineering teams, ensuring consistency without stifling team-level autonomy.
• Act as a hands-on technical leader: review designs, unblock complex integration problems, and step into implementation when a team needs it, not just diagrams.
• Mentor senior engineers and architects on modern cloud patterns, distributed-systems trade-offs, and pragmatic sequencing of technical debt versus new investment.
• Model a bias for action, bringing an iterative, ship-and-learn mindset while operating within enterprise governance and risk expectations.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering & product leaders and executive stakeholders, translating architectural decisions into business impact, risk, and cost.
• Partner with cybersecurity, data governance, and compliance teams to ensure architectural decisions meet enterprise security and regulatory standards.
• Evaluate vendor platforms and build-vs-buy decisions, weighing cost, resilience, and integration complexity.
• Track and report on architecture health: uptime, IT service levels, integration risk, and adoption of modern patterns across business platforms.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and performance-based bonuses.
• Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision.
• Flexible working hours and remote work options.
• Professional development opportunities and training.
• Generous paid time off and holidays.

Company Description

Pearson is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status.