{"id":4094915,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pearson-principal-enterprise-architect","title":"Principal, Enterprise Architect","company":{"id":34029,"name":"Pearson","domain":"pearson.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/pearson","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":22,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.773,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":29,"computed_at":"2026-11-11T05:49:22Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Healing","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon EventBridge","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-11T15:47:18Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-11","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T20:55:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Role Overview\nPearson 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.\nAs 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, and making the calls that reduce 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.\nThis is not an ivory-tower architecture role. You will spend real time on designs, code, and incident retrospectives alongside engineering teams, bringing the pragmatic, ship-and-learn instincts of a high-growth startup to an enterprise setting that has to get security, compliance, and reliability right.\nKey Responsibilities\nArchitecture Strategy & Enterprise Modernization\nDefine the north-star technical architecture for PVS's core platforms, aligning business strategy with modern, sustainable cloud topologies.\n\nLead the migration and refactoring of legacy, monolithic, or on-premise systems into decoupled, cloud-native architectures.\n\nOwn multi-year modernization roadmaps that balance pragmatic delivery with long-term platform health, sequencing initiatives for measurable reductions in legacy dependencies.\n\nPresent architectural strategy and trade-offs to cross-functional steering committees and project boards, driving alignment and prioritization on platform investment.\n\nCloud-Native, Event-Driven & API Patterns\nDesign systems for elastic, demand-driven scaling, including workloads that scale to zero when idle and scale out based on real-time queue depth.\n\nArchitect loosely coupled, event-driven integrations using message brokers and event streams, applying saga patterns to manage complex distributed transactions.\n\nEstablish API-first design discipline across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL contracts so services integrate cleanly and predictably.\n\nGuide adoption of agentic and autonomous processing patterns, including background workers, self-healing units, and AI/LLM orchestration, where they solve real platform problems.\n\nTechnical Leadership & Mentorship\nDefine, document, and champion architectural patterns and guardrails across engineering teams, ensuring consistency without stifling team-level autonomy.\n\nAct as a hands-on technical leader: review designs, unblock complex integration problems, and step into implementation when a team needs it, not just diagrams.\n\nMentor senior engineers and architects on modern cloud patterns, distributed-systems trade-offs, and pragmatic sequencing of technical debt versus new investment.\n\nModel a bias for action, bringing an iterative, ship-and-learn mindset while operating within enterprise governance and risk expectations.\n\nCross-Functional Partnership & Governance\nServe as a trusted advisor to engineering & product leaders and executive stakeholders, translating architectural decisions into business impact, risk, and cost.\n\nPartner with cybersecurity, data governance, and compliance teams to ensure architectural decisions meet enterprise security and regulatory standards.\n\nEvaluate vendor platforms and build-vs-buy decisions, weighing cost, resilience, and integration complexity.\n\nTrack and report on architecture health: uptime, IT service levels, integration risk, and adoption of modern patterns across business platforms.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\n10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated progression into enterprise-scale architecture roles.\n\nSignificant tenure at fast-growing, internet-based startups, with firsthand experience building under constraints, scaling rapidly, and making pragmatic trade-offs.\n\nProven track record modernizing legacy, on-premise, or monolithic enterprise systems into cloud-native architectures.\n\nDeep expertise with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and the foundational patterns that make cloud services resilient and cost-effective.\n\nHands-on experience with event-driven and asynchronous integration: message brokers, event streams (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS EventBridge), and saga patterns for distributed transactions.\n\nStrong discipline in API-first design (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) as the contract layer between services.\n\nExperience with containerization and orchestration (Kubernetes, serverless container environments) at production scale.\n\nFamiliarity with agentic workflows, background/autonomous processing, and modern AI/LLM orchestration patterns.\n\nExceptional communication skills, comfortable pitching architectural vision to executive stakeholders and debugging distributed-systems issues with senior engineers in the same week.\n\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent; advanced degree a plus.\n\nEdTech, SaaS, or K-12 platform experience a plus, not required.\n\nKey Behaviors & Attributes\nTransformation-Minded: You treat legacy complexity as an opportunity, not a threat, and lead teams into modernization with conviction and empathy.\nBias Toward Action: You bring the ship-fast instincts of a startup into an enterprise setting - pragmatic trade-offs over perfect designs, without cutting corners on risk.\nStrategic and Grounded: You translate a multi-year architecture strategy into concrete, sequenced technical decisions that teams can actually execute.\nHands-On by Default: You stay close to the code and the design reviews - this is a working architect role, not a diagrams-only role.\nTrusted Advisor: You move fluidly between a C-suite architecture pitch and a debugging session on an asynchronous race condition, and both audiences trust your judgment.\nCollaborative by Default: You build guardrails and patterns with engineering teams, not for them, so adoption sticks without heavy-handed enforcement.\nKey Relationships\nDirect Reports: None - individual contributor role; sets technical direction and mentors senior engineers and architects across teams\nPeers: Lead, Solution Architecture; Lead, Service Operations & Cyber Risk; other senior technical leaders within Platform & Security\nCross-functional: Engineering, Product Management, Security, Data Governance, and DevSecOps teams across PVS\nExternal: Cloud and vendor platform partners, Pearson corporate technology\nPearson is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. 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