Job description

Job Title - Senior Software Engineer - VTS

About Pearson

[Insert from Talent Team]

About VTS

VTS is Pearson’s Professional Assessments test delivery platform, supporting the secure, reliable, and scalable delivery of assessments across Pearson’s certification and professional testing business. The platform environment includes modern and legacy systems, with ongoing focus on platform modernization, service resilience, API-first integration, cloud-native delivery, and improved developer and operational practices.

Summary

As a Senior Software Engineer, you are a highly skilled individual contributor and a technical authority within your area. You lead the design, implementation, optimization, and support of complex software components, services, and platforms that enable key business capabilities and customer experiences.

Working with significant independence, you evaluate technical options, guide design decisions, identify risks, and build scalable, maintainable, resilient solutions. You are frequently consulted on architecture reviews, performance optimization, operational stability, and complex problem resolution. You lead through expertise rather than formal authority — mentoring engineers, improving practices, and helping teams make sound technical and release decisions. You partner closely with Product Managers, Business Analysts, Product Architects, Quality Engineering, and DevOps to deliver secure, reliable, and highly scalable solutions.

Key responsibilities

Technical leadership (through expertise)

Lead design and implementation for complex software components, services, and platforms.

Drive technical decision-making for major features and engineering initiatives.

Influence software architecture, design patterns, and engineering standards within your domain.

Lead technical design sessions and contribute to architectural discussions with Product Architects.

Mentor and coach engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance.

Participate in interviews to help assess and hire engineering talent.

Communicate technical direction, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to stakeholders outside your immediate team.

Software development

Design and deliver enterprise-scale, secure, maintainable, and scalable software solutions.

Evaluate design alternatives and recommend approaches balancing value, risk, performance, and maintainability.

Lead complex troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for critical production issues.

Identify and mitigate technical debt, performance bottlenecks, reliability concerns, and operational risk.

Quality, delivery, and collaboration

Champion engineering best practices across testing, automation, deployment, observability, and security.

Partner with Quality Engineering to advance quality-by-design and automation.

Support release planning, deployment, and operational readiness.

Contribute to roadmap planning, technical estimation, and platform modernization.

Required education and experience

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

5+ years of professional software development experience.

Demonstrated experience leading the design and delivery of complex, distributed systems.

Experience providing technical leadership and mentorship within Agile engineering teams.

Experience designing and operating within cloud-native environments.

Technology stack

This is the current stack for the team you would join. Direct experience is preferred, and strong experience with comparable languages, frameworks, and toolsets will also be considered.

Java

Spring Boot

Angular

REST APIs

Microsoft Azure

Microservices Architecture

AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code)

Desired knowledge, skills, and abilities

Strong software design and system architecture skills.

Experience building highly available and scalable enterprise applications.

Cloud-based DevOps workflows, CI/CD, application security, observability, and performance engineering.

Experience mentoring engineers and raising engineering capability.

Familiarity with LLMs / ML concepts and practical use of AI-assisted development tools in day-to-day engineering work, preferred.

Experience supporting accessibility compliance and WCAG standards, preferred.

Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, including explaining technical tradeoffs to non-technical audiences.

Success measures

Delivers complex technical solutions that support critical business objectives.

Builds software with strong reliability, maintainability, scalability, security, and performance.

Influences technical direction through sound engineering judgment and well-supported recommendations.

Is sought out by other engineers for guidance on difficult technical problems.

Improves the capability of the broader engineering team through mentorship.

Contributes to hiring quality through active participation in the interview process.

Communicates technical concepts and tradeoffs clearly to stakeholders outside engineering, building trust and alignment.

Identifies and addresses technical risks before they impact delivery, operations, or customers.

Leadership behaviors

Customer Centricity Anticipates customer needs by designing solutions that improve reliability, usability, performance, and scalability.

Raise the Performance Bar Sets a high standard for engineering quality and continuously explores better tools, frameworks, and approaches.

Exceptional Collaboration for Value Builds strong technical partnerships and helps teams make better decisions through knowledge sharing and constructive challenge.

Our Leaders Inspire Leads through credibility, expertise, and mentorship, creating an environment where engineers grow and solve hard problems together.

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