{"id":2520427,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pearson-staff-software-engineer-10","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":34029,"name":"Pearson","domain":"pearson.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/pearson","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.842,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":26,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Sri Lanka"],"countries":["LK"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":40000,"max_usd":85000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":2198},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"ASP.NET Core","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Coherence","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"JQuery","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Rest API","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"MS SQL","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-14T09:17:48Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T05:39:33Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Pearson Virtual Schools serves K-12 students and their teachers on Connexus, a large-scale student, curriculum, and assessment data platform. Engineering Leads sita layer above the delivery teams, spanning two or three of them and in most cases aligned to a single initiative. You are the engineering voice for those teams and the bridge between them and everyone who needs something from them.\nWe are modernizing a platform that today runs primarily on legacy .NET Frameworks: IIS-based ASP.NET WebFormsand MVC, an AngularJS and jQuery front end, and SQL Server. The future is design-system-based React and TypeScript single-page applications calling .NET REST services that operate in containerized modern .NET, and integrate with an API-first, event-driven model on AWS with externalized authorization. Your teams will work on both sides of this technology, the legacyand the new.\nEach team is built to a deliberately lean shape, with a dedicated engineer in test. That shape only works if the engineers stay focused on building, which means the work that would otherwise interrupt them lands with you. Release requests, the platform service tickets your teams depend onand the follow-up on them, engagement with Architecture, UX, Security, and Product, and representation in discovery all sit with the Engineering Lead. This is not a coding-primary role, and it is not a step out of engineering either. You need the depth to hold the cross-team technical view and the credibility to be believed when you use it.\nYou are expected to be AI-native in how you work. That means building and operating agents, authoring reusable skills and machine-readable knowledge that others retrieve, and taking the conductor role on agentic generation batches that span your teams, where the review that matters happens at the seams rather than line by line.\nKey Responsibilities\nThe Bridge to Product and Discovery\nRepresent your teams in four-in-a-box discovery, and bring back a shaped problem rather than a list of asks\n\nServe as the engineering bridge to Product, so a question about feasibility gets an answer from someone accountable for the build\n\nPartner with the technical delivery manager to prioritize and sequence work across your teams\n\nSpeak for the teams in the forums they cannot all attend, and carry the decision back accurately\n\nCross-Team Technical Coherence\nHold the technical view across your teams, and own the interfaces and contracts between them\n\nDetect and correct architectural drift while it is still a code review rather than a migration\n\nAct as conductor on agentic generation batches that span your teams, owning interface coordination, merge sequencing, and quality at that scope\n\nContribute to the engineering standards that ground automated code review, written as violations specific enough for an agent to detect in a diff\n\nClearing the Path\nOwn release requests and the platform service tickets your teams depend on, including the follow-up nobody else is chasing\n\nAbsorb the engagement with Architecture, UX, Security, and Compliance, so the engineers are not the ones scheduling it\n\nEscalate what cannot be resolved at your level early, rather than letting it sit as a blocked sprint\n\nQuality Across the Teams\nHold specification-first practice: contract-level tests before the implementation, negative tests as a first-class obligation, and evals wherever behavior is model-backed\n\nEnsure the automated merge gates are not routinely overridden, and treat a suite that never fails as a defect rather than a result\n\nWhere a surface reaches a student, a family, a teacher, or school staff, hold the guardrails, human-in-the-loop fallback, and disclosure with the team rather than after release\n\nCapability and Shared Tooling\nAuthor reusable skills, MCP servers, and machine-readable knowledge into the governed shared library, so what your teams learn reaches the teams you do not cover\n\nCoach the engineers on your teams without managing them, and be the person they consult on a hard technical call\n\nStay close enough to the code to remain credible, which is a deliberate use of your time rather than a hobby\n\nDomain Depth for This Posting\nOwn deep domain understanding of Connexus data foundations, including student, enrollment, curriculum, assessment, progress, attendance, and school operations data.\n\nLead safe migration and cutover sequencing for assigned domains, including legacy behavior analysis, reconciliation, rollback planning, and production-readiness validation.\n\nTranslate legacy SQL Server, stored procedure, and .NET behavior into durable PostgreSQL schemas, APIs, events, and domain contracts.\n\nApply policy-aware data access patterns for K-12 education systems, including FERPA-sensitive data boundaries, externalized authorization, and audit-ready access controls.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\n7+ years of engineering experience with production ownership, at a level where engineers operating at our bar for AI-fluent engineering will take your technical judgment seriously\n\nExperience working across several teams without formal authority over any of them\n\nComfortable being accountable for outcomes you do not personally build\n\nPracticed at translating between product intent and engineering reality in both directions, including saying no with a reason\n\nDemonstrated AI-native practice: agents you have built and operated, skills or MCP servers you have authored for others to reuse, and a clear account of how you review AI-generated work\n\nPracticed in test-driven development, including negative testing that proves a rule denies\n\nAble to read legacy C#/.NET and T-SQL well enough to reason about a migration, whether or notit is your preferred stack\n\nExperience in regulated or privacy-sensitive environments; K-12 and FERPA exposure an advantage\n\nRelevant degree or equivalent practical experience\n\nSkills and Experience\nThe skills and experiencethis role isassessed against.\nCore skills\nAdaptability\n\nArtificial Intelligence\n\nLearning to Learn\n\nEngineering fundamentals\nCollaboration\n\nInformation Security\n\nInnovation\n\nProblem Solving\n\nTechnical Acumen\n\nRole-specific skills\nAPI Management\n\nCloud Computing\n\nData Security\n\nDevOps\n\nEthical Responsibility\n\nResilience Planning\n\nSoftware Design\n\nEmerging skills\nAI Agents\n\nAutomated Artificial Intelligence (AutoAI)\n\nSpecialist depth for this role\nStakeholder Management\n\nRequirements Analysis\n\nPrioritization\n\nInfluencing Skills\n\nDecision Making\n\nMentorship\n\nCross-team interface coordination\n\nAgentic batch conducting at initiative scope\n\nAuthoring reusable engineering tooling and machine-readable knowledge for others to use\n\nRelease and platform-service navigation across environments","description_format":"text","description_chars":6690,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["EdTech Platforms","Publishing","E-learning"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-14T10:49:24Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/pearson-staff-software-engineer-10","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/pearson-staff-software-engineer-10.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-15T09:55:09Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14856,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-16T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":34029},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=34029"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fpearson-staff-software-engineer-10"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fpearson-staff-software-engineer-10"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fpearson-staff-software-engineer-10"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/pearson-staff-software-engineer-10\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fpearson-staff-software-engineer-10"}]}