Staff Software Engineer

Pearson Virtual Schools serves K-12 students and their teachers on Connexus, a large-scale student, curriculum, and assessment data platform. Engineering Leads sit a layer above the delivery teams, spanning two or three of them and in most cases aligned to a single initiative. You are the engineering voice for those teams and the bridge between them and everyone who needs something from them.

We are modernizing a platform that today runs primarily on legacy .NET Frameworks: IIS-based ASP.NET WebForms and MVC, an AngularJS and jQuery front end, and SQL Server. The future is design-system-based React and TypeScript single-page applications calling .NET REST services that operate in containerized modern .NET, and integrate with an API-first, event-driven model on AWS with externalized authorization. Your teams will work on both sides of this technology, the legacy and the new.

Each team is built to a deliberately lean shape, with a dedicated engineer in test. That shape only works if the engineers stay focused on building, which means the work that would otherwise interrupt them lands with you. Release requests, the platform service tickets your teams depend on and the follow-up on them, engagement with Architecture, UX, Security, and Product, and representation in discovery all sit with the Engineering Lead. This is not a coding-primary role, and it is not a step out of engineering either. You need the depth to hold the cross-team technical view and the credibility to be believed when you use it.

You are expected to be AI-native in how you work. That means building and operating agents, authoring reusable skills and machine-readable knowledge that others retrieve, and taking the conductor role on agentic generation batches that span your teams, where the review that matters happens at the seams rather than line by line.

Key Responsibilities

The Bridge to Product and Discovery

• Represent your teams in four-in-a-box discovery, and bring back a shaped problem rather than a list of asks

• Serve as the engineering bridge to Product, so a question about feasibility gets an answer from someone accountable for the build

• Partner with the technical delivery manager to prioritize and sequence work across your teams

• Speak for the teams in the forums they cannot all attend, and carry the decision back accurately

Cross-Team Technical Coherence

• Hold the technical view across your teams, and own the interfaces and contracts between them

• Detect and correct architectural drift while it is still a code review rather than a migration

• Act as conductor on agentic generation batches that span your teams, owning interface coordination, merge sequencing, and quality at that scope

• Contribute to the engineering standards that ground automated code review, written as violations specific enough for an agent to detect in a diff

Clearing the Path

• Own release requests and the platform service tickets your teams depend on, including the follow-up nobody else is chasing

• Absorb the engagement with Architecture, UX, Security, and Compliance, so the engineers are not the ones scheduling it

• Escalate what cannot be resolved at your level early, rather than letting it sit as a blocked sprint

Quality Across the Teams

• Hold specification-first practice: contract-level tests before the implementation, negative tests as a first-class obligation, and evals wherever behavior is model-backed

• Ensure the automated merge gates are not routinely overridden, and treat a suite that never fails as a defect rather than a result

• Where a surface reaches a student, a family, a teacher, or school staff, hold the guardrails, human-in-the-loop fallback, and disclosure with the team rather than after release

Capability and Shared Tooling

• Author reusable skills, MCP servers, and machine-readable knowledge into the governed shared library, so what your teams learn reaches the teams you do not cover

• Coach the engineers on your teams without managing them, and be the person they consult on a hard technical call

• Stay close enough to the code to remain credible, which is a deliberate use of your time rather than a hobby

Domain Depth for This Posting

• Own deep domain understanding of Connexus data foundations, including student, enrollment, curriculum, assessment, progress, attendance, and school operations data.

• Lead safe migration and cutover sequencing for assigned domains, including legacy behavior analysis, reconciliation, rollback planning, and production-readiness validation.

• Translate legacy SQL Server, stored procedure, and .NET behavior into durable PostgreSQL schemas, APIs, events, and domain contracts.

• Apply policy-aware data access patterns for K-12 education systems, including FERPA-sensitive data boundaries, externalized authorization, and audit-ready access controls.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience with production ownership, at a level where engineers operating at our bar for AI-fluent engineering will take your technical judgment seriously

• Experience working across several teams without formal authority over any of them

• Comfortable being accountable for outcomes you do not personally build

• Practiced at translating between product intent and engineering reality in both directions, including saying no with a reason

• Demonstrated AI-native practice: agents you have built and operated, skills or MCP servers you have authored for others to reuse, and a clear account of how you review AI-generated work

• Practiced in test-driven development, including negative testing that proves a rule denies

• Able to read legacy C#/.NET and T-SQL well enough to reason about a migration, whether or not it is your preferred stack

• Experience in regulated or privacy-sensitive environments; K-12 and FERPA exposure an advantage

• Relevant degree or equivalent practical experience

Skills and Experience

The skills and experience this role is assessed against.

Core skills

• Adaptability

• Artificial Intelligence

• Learning to Learn

Engineering fundamentals

• Collaboration

• Information Security

• Innovation

• Problem Solving

• Technical Acumen

Role-specific skills

• API Management

• Cloud Computing

• Data Security

• DevOps

• Ethical Responsibility

• Resilience Planning

• Software Design

Emerging skills

• AI Agents

• Automated Artificial Intelligence (AutoAI)

Specialist depth for this role

• Stakeholder Management

• Requirements Analysis

• Prioritization

• Influencing Skills

• Decision Making

• Mentorship

• Cross-team interface coordination

• Agentic batch conducting at initiative scope

• Authoring reusable engineering tooling and machine-readable knowledge for others to use

• Release and platform-service navigation across environments