About PEARSON

Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, with over 48,000 people in more than 70 countries, helping people of all ages to make progress in their lives through all kinds of learning.

Pearson owns brands such as Financial Times, Penguin and Pearson Education with overall revenue of over $10 B in 2012.

We are Pearson Lanka, a core part of Pearson's global Learning Technologies team. We build and manage some of the industry leading cloud based learning platforms that serve millions of students across the world. Over the years, we have built a strong Agile Development team, and we are now looking to expand aggressively over the next 12 months.  The industry leading cloud-based technology platforms of Pearson help educate more than 30 million students across the globe.

The 360+ strong engineering team based out of the Colombo office works dedicatedly to service Pearson technology companies located in North America  and Australia.

At Pearson, we aim to be the best company to work for in the world. It is part of our philosophy to provide benefits, profit share plans, development opportunities and a culture that beats anywhere else. If you are 'always learning', and have a passion for technology and creativity, send in your resume and join our exciting engineering culture.

 

Software Architect                            

The role of the Software Architect is focused on Architecture and design decisions that maps to the business needs, product lines and technology strategy drive of the organization. The role is responsible for supporting eLearning Platform Architecture and the on-going Research & Development on new technologies to realize the Pearson Technology Vision and emerging product features.

The responsibilities include

(i) the Project specific role, with the assignment to one or more product development teams

(iii) the research and innovation initiatives on the newer technologies. There are specific goals for each of the role - the project or the research initiatives.

Core activities of the role include determining non-functional needs, modelling and evaluating candidate architectural / design solutions, facilitating the competing solution concepts toward effective business decisions and negotiating design trade-offs with stakeholders and engineers. The candidate must possess good communication and presentation skills, as collaboration multiple departments including technology, engineering, product and PMO will be required. The individual will be required to participate in periodic appraisal cycles to evaluate and determine opportunities for progression.

This position will be required to be on-ground in Colombo, Sri Lanka with occasional international travel.

ACCOUNTABILITIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Acts as subject matter expert in the architecture and design; creates architecture and design artifacts using UML
• Facilitates architecture and design decisions in support of Technical specialists, engineers and other architects
• Drives or participates in the architecture / design reviews.
• Identifies / creates candidate architectures to address functional and non-functional requirements.
• Evaluates non-functional design / architecture trade-offs, works with stakeholders to ensure trade-off decisions are well-informed and aligned with business goals
• Learn and work against architectures/solutions already in place.
• Works to develop new skills in architecture, design & development; offers advice on best practices.
• Able to identify key areas of focus in project roadmaps, and drive the necessary focuses with the teams.
• Leads system design meetings; mentors Developers/Technical Specialists in modeling and the applications of patterns and practices.  Also makes recommendations for improvement changes.
• Advocates continually improving design practices to promote consistency and innovation
• Other duties as assigned, time-to-time

EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / MIS, Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics or equivalent education and eight (8) years of experience in developing enterprise applications and software products, with significant experience in a role leading software design decisions, facilitating architecture tradeoffs, and mentoring software engineers and technical leads / specialists.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES

• Recommended Experience

• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills
• Strong experience with a major RDBMS and non-RDBMS platforms (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra)
• Should be able to function effectively in an Agile project setting. Evaluate and drive decisions that are iteration-friendly.
• Experience in a customer-facing capacity.
• At least 3 years in an Architect capacity.

• Desirable knowledge, Skills and Abilities.

• Core Platform Experience (J2EE / .NET).
• New platforms stacks such as Google V8, Ruby on Rails and the likes.
• ATAM or equivalent Architecture Evaluation Methodologies.
• Experience with one or more integration brokers and enterprise messaging / JMS / AMQP.
• Ability to be self-motivated.

CERTIFICATES, LICENSES, REGISTRATIONS

• Certification in Architecture practice from any leading organizations