Lead Specialist,Technical Architect

Description

Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, helping people of all ages make progress in their lives through education. We deliver high-quality content, assessments, and digital services to learners, educators, and institutions globally.

Our Team is responsible for the delivery of nearly 4 million examination results per annum, including A-Level, GCSE, BTEC and T-levels for students in UK and International centres. Our in-house systems process every learner from registration to marking and certification, in a highly regulated business. We currently operate a hybrid estate of predominantly bespoke systems, with an ongoing strategic transformation programme to migrate from on-prem to cloud based, cost effective, scalable, and resilient services.

About the Role

This role is focused on building and evolving the cloud-based integration capabilities supporting the Azure Technical Hub. You will take technical ownership of the architecture, design and implementation of integration solutions and supporting engineering capabilities, leading engineers and delivery partners through detailed design, development, testing, deployment, production readiness and ongoing evolution of the platform.

This is a highly hands-on technical leadership role combining architecture with implementation. You will be expected to contribute directly to complex development work, review production code, troubleshoot difficult integration and performance issues, make detailed technical decisions and provide day-to-day technical direction to engineers. The successful candidate will be accountable for evolving the Technical Hub architecture and translating it into a robust, scalable and production-ready implementation, driving the solution through to successful delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Take technical ownership of the architecture, design, implementation and production readiness of Azure Technical Hub integration solutions and supporting engineering capabilities, leading engineers and delivery partners through to successful delivery.
• Design and implement Azure-based integration solutions using API, event-driven and asynchronous messaging patterns, selecting appropriate integration approaches based on functional and non-functional requirements.
• Define and govern integration patterns, API contracts and standards, event schemas, message contracts, CDC and event publishing patterns.
• Act as the senior hands-on technical authority for the integration engineering team, making detailed implementation decisions, resolving complex technical issues, reviewing code and providing day-to-day technical leadership and mentoring to engineers.
• Define and govern standards for retries, dead-letter handling, replay, idempotency, observability and operational resilience.
• Provide architectural oversight and review integration designs across internal teams and suppliers, ensuring consistency with agreed technical standards and engineering best practices.
• Drive technical excellence, performance, scalability and engineering quality across Technical Hub integration solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical ownership of CI/CD and deployment automation for integration services, including Git/GitHub, GitHub Actions, Jenkins or Azure DevOps, and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or equivalent technologies. Be comfortable troubleshooting and evolving existing pipelines and deployment automation where required.
• Support the operational lifecycle of cloud integration services, including releases, environment configuration, platform upgrades and troubleshooting of deployment, networking and security issues.
• Work closely with Data Architects to ensure enterprise data models are implemented consistently within integration solutions.

Required Skills and Experience

• Proven experience as a hands-on Technical Architect, Integration Architect, Lead Integration Engineer or similar technical leadership role, with demonstrable experience architecting, designing, building and taking enterprise cloud integration solutions into production.
• Strong understanding of enterprise integration patterns across synchronous APIs, asynchronous messaging and event-driven integration, with the ability to select appropriate patterns based on solution requirements.
• Strong software engineering background with recent hands-on experience developing enterprise integration solutions using C#/.NET and Azure integration services. Strong Java experience may also be considered where accompanied by substantial hands-on Azure integration experience.
• Strong experience designing and implementing API-based integrations using Azure API Management, with a good understanding of API security, policies, versioning, routing and operational considerations.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and implementing Azure integration solutions using Azure Service Bus, including topics, subscriptions, sessions, message settlement, duplicate detection and dead-letter handling, with practical experience of Azure Functions, Azure SQL Managed Instance and related Azure integration services.
• Strong experience designing event-driven integration solutions, including event schemas, message contracts, Change Data Capture (CDC), Outbox patterns, event publishing and resilient messaging.
• Practical experience with CDC-based integration and associated processing patterns such as checkpointing, batching, replay and recovery.
• Strong practical understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous messaging patterns, including message ordering, delivery guarantees, eventual consistency, retries, dead-letter queues, replay, checkpointing, idempotency, duplicate processing, failure recovery, observability and operational resilience.
• Experience designing, performance-testing and tuning high-volume integration workloads, including throughput, latency, batching, back-pressure, scaling and recovery from processing backlogs.
• Strong practical experience with CI/CD, Git/GitHub and automated deployment pipelines using technologies such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps, together with working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or equivalent technologies.
• Good understanding of Azure networking, security and identity for cloud integration solutions, including Managed Identity, Entra ID, RBAC, secrets management and secure service-to-service communication.
• Demonstrable recent hands-on engineering experience, with the ability to work directly with production code and personally design, develop, troubleshoot and optimise complex enterprise integration solutions rather than operating solely in an architecture or governance capacity.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to lead technical discussions and work effectively across architecture and engineering teams.

Highly Desirable

• Experience delivering Technical Hub, Integration Hub, API Gateway or other shared integration platforms.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity, while maintaining appropriate code quality, security, testing and technical governance.
• Experience working across both Azure and AWS cloud environments, including practical exposure to AWS integration services such as Lambda, DMS, SQS/SNS, EventBridge and Aurora (PostgreSQL/MySQL).
• Experience with additional Azure integration services such as Azure Data Factory and Event Grid.
• Experience working within large-scale cloud transformation programmes involving multiple teams and suppliers.
• Experience working in highly regulated enterprise environments.
  

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