Principal, Enterprise Architect

Pearson•United States,

About The Position

Pearson Virtual Schools is rebuilding parts of its technology foundation to make learning platforms more resilient, secure, and cloud-native. The Principal, Enterprise Architect leads transformative architectural initiatives for core platforms, balancing strategic planning with hands-on technical execution in an enterprise environment with substantial security, compliance, and reliability expectations. The role defines architecture strategy and modernization roadmaps, leads the transition of legacy systems to cloud-native architectures, and guides teams in designing and integrating distributed systems. It also establishes architectural patterns and guardrails, mentors senior technical staff, and advises engineering, product, and executive stakeholders on technical decisions and their business impact. This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports, and includes hands-on participation in design, code, integration challenges, and incident retrospectives.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with demonstrated progression into enterprise-scale architecture roles.
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, including foundational patterns for resilient and cost-effective cloud services.
Hands-on experience with event-driven and asynchronous integration, message brokers, event streams, and saga patterns for distributed transactions.
Strong API-first design discipline involving REST, gRPC, and GraphQL.
Experience with containerization and orchestration, such as Kubernetes or serverless container environments, at production scale.
Exceptional communication skills, including presenting architectural vision to executives and debugging distributed-systems issues with senior engineers.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

Nice To Haves

Significant tenure at fast-growing, internet-based startups, with experience building under constraints, scaling rapidly, and making pragmatic trade-offs.
Familiarity with agentic workflows, background or autonomous processing, and modern AI/LLM orchestration patterns.
Advanced degree.
EdTech, SaaS, or K-12 platform experience.

Responsibilities

Define the north-star technical architecture for core platforms, aligning business strategy with modern, sustainable cloud topologies.
Lead migration and refactoring of legacy, monolithic, or on-premise systems into decoupled, cloud-native architectures.
Own multi-year modernization roadmaps, sequence initiatives, and balance delivery with long-term platform health.
Present architectural strategy and trade-offs to steering committees and project boards to drive alignment and investment prioritization.
Design systems for elastic, demand-driven scaling, including scale-to-zero workloads and scaling based on real-time queue depth.
Architect loosely coupled, event-driven integrations using message brokers and event streams, including saga patterns for distributed transactions.
Establish API-first design practices across REST, gRPC, and GraphQL contracts.
Guide adoption of agentic and autonomous processing patterns, including background workers, self-healing units, and AI/LLM orchestration where appropriate.
Define, document, and champion architectural patterns and guardrails across engineering teams.
Review designs, resolve complex integration problems, and contribute to implementation when needed.
Mentor senior engineers and architects on cloud patterns, distributed-systems trade-offs, and technical investment sequencing.
Model an iterative, ship-and-learn approach within enterprise governance and risk expectations.
Advise engineering, product, and executive stakeholders, translating architectural decisions into business impact, risk, and cost.
Partner with cybersecurity, data governance, and compliance teams to meet enterprise security and regulatory standards.
Evaluate vendor platforms and build-versus-buy decisions, considering cost, resilience, and integration complexity.
Track and report architecture health, including uptime, IT service levels, integration risk, and adoption of modern patterns.