Principal, Enterprise Architect

Pearson•United States,

About The Position

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, 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. This 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.

Requirements

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.
Transformation-Minded: You treat legacy complexity as an opportunity, not a threat, and lead teams into modernization with conviction and empathy.
Bias 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.
Strategic and Grounded: You translate a multi-year architecture strategy into concrete, sequenced technical decisions that teams can actually execute.
Hands-On by Default: You stay close to the code and the design reviews - this is a working architect role, not a diagrams-only role.
Trusted 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.
Collaborative by Default: You build guardrails and patterns with engineering teams, not for them, so adoption sticks without heavy-handed enforcement.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree a plus.
EdTech, SaaS, or K-12 platform experience a plus, not required.

Responsibilities

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.