Staff Software Engineer

Pearson's PSG-CP (Pearson Software Group - Content Platform) team is looking for a forward deployed engineer who shows up where the work is happening, listens to a problem that nobody has fully written down yet, and leaves with software that addresses it. Not a deck, not a spec, not a Jira epic - running software.

You sit closer to the customer than a typical engineer and closer to the code than a typical solutions architect. The job is to compress the distance between "we need something that does X" and "here, try this."

You will embed directly with our most strategic internal lines of business to drive AI adoption and ship working software against real problems. You will operate autonomously, thrive under ambiguity, and represent PSG-CP at the highest level inside the business. This is a significant responsibility — you'll play a key role in how AI shows up across Pearson.

What you'd actually be doing

• Going where the problem is. You will work directly with the internal stakeholders inside our different lines of business. Through real understanding of their pain points, their workflows, and the architecture of their current technical landscape, you'll design and build systems end to end for them. These are the people who will actually use what you build. You meet them on their ground, in their workflow, with their data.
• Conducting real discovery. You're not waiting for a finished brief. You sit with users, watch them work, ask the questions, and translate what you hear into something buildable. The discovery is part of the engineering job, not a step that happens before it.
• Building during the conversation. The first version often exists before the meeting ends. People react to working software very differently than they react to wireframes — your job is to give them something to react to as fast as possible.
• Working from messy inputs. Spreadsheets, PDFs, screenshots, recorded calls, half-written documents, contradictory emails from two st