Lead Specialist, Solution Architect

Pearson

About The Position

The Solutions Architect on the OnVUE team will be senior technical leader responsible for defining, guiding, and governing the architecture of the platform and product area, being a key technical contributor for a major core offering as a part of Pearson VUE. This role provides hands-on architectural direction and technical leadership ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with broader platform and enterprise standards. The Solutions Architect works closely with the platform architect, product management, engineering leads, and the OnVUE team to translate product requirements into sound technical designs and to support successful implementation throughout the development lifecycle. The Product: Our OnVUE remote proctoring system allows people to take exams anywhere in the world. OnVUEʼs software provides streaming video of the exam taker to the proctor supervising the exam in a secure and interactive way. The OnVUE product has grown significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic and is a core part of Pearson VUEʼs testing strategy. We are planning for significant investment in the technology powering OnVUE and this role will be key to taking this product into the future. OnVUEʼs primary tech stack is Java (currently version 25) and Angular (currently version 19) and we strive to use modern versions. OnVUE runs in Microsoft Azure in Kubernetes.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
Strong experience designing and implementing software systems in enterprise or product-based environments.
Experience designing APIs, service integrations, and distributed systems.
Proven ability to guide teams through complex technical decisions.
Strong documentation and communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers, event-driven systems).
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and automated testing.
Experience working on high-availability or customer-facing platforms.
Exposure to security best practices, authentication/authorization, and data protection.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the end-to-end architecture for a specific product or product domain.
Design solution architecture, balancing functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and delivery constraints.
Define and document architectural patterns including microservices, APIs, data flows, integration approaches, and deployment models.
Ensure solutions align with modernization goals such as cloud-native design, resiliency, scalability, and maintainability.
Translate business requirements and technical constraints into actionable design guidance for engineers.
Review and approve significant design and implementation decisions within the team.
Identify and resolve day-to-day architectural, integration, and build issues to maintain system consistency and stability.
Ensure adherence to enterprise architecture standards while tailoring solutions to product-specific needs.
Provide ongoing architectural guidance during development, testing, and release cycles.
Partner closely with engineers to ensure designs are implemented correctly and pragmatically.
Perform design and code reviews with an architectural lens, focusing on quality, scalability, security, and performance.
Identify technical risks early and collaborate with the team to define mitigation strategies.
Ensure solutions meet security, privacy, availability, and compliance requirements.
Support incremental modernization and refactoring of existing systems toward target-state architecture.
Balance architectural rigor with delivery velocity, making informed trade-offs when necessary.
Act as the primary architectural point of contact for the product team.
Collaborate with: Platform architects to ensure alignment with shared services and standards Product managers to shape technically feasible roadmaps Tech leads and developers to align on implementation strategy
Provide technical mentorship to engineers, helping raise overall design and engineering maturity.
Facilitate architectural discussions and decision-making within the team.
Clearly communicate architectural intent, trade-offs, and rationale to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Promote consistent engineering and architectural best practices within the team.