Staff Software Engineer - Python in Chennai, India

Role: Staff Software Engineer - Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE) Location: Bengaluru/Chennai - Hybrid (3 days in Office per week) About Pearson

Pearson is the world's leading learning company, dedicated to helping people make progress in their lives through education. We deliver high-quality content, assessments, and digital services to learners, educators, and institutions globally. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Forward Deployment Engineer (FDE) who thrives in ambiguity and is passionate about transforming complex business challenges into measurable outcomes.

The Forward Deployment Engineer operates at the intersection of business strategy, product thinking, software engineering, cloud engineering, security, and AI-assisted delivery. Enable permanent teams.
Drive initiatives from concept through implementation, adoption, and operational readiness.
Make pragmatic trade-offs across speed, quality, scalability, security, maintainability, and cost.
Build critical solution components and reference implementations when required.
Design solutions across enterprise applications, APIs, cloud services, data platforms, AI services, and legacy technologies.
Establish scalable, resilient, and maintainable solution foundations.
Define clear ownership boundaries, interfaces, standards, and engineering practices.
Cloud Engineering

Design, build, and operate cloud-native solutions across AWS and/or Azure environments.
Apply Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, Kubernetes, automation, deployment pipelines, observability, and operational excellence practices.
Optimise performance, reliability, availability, and cost efficiency of cloud-based workloads.
Contribute to reusable cloud engineering patterns, standards, and engineering accelerators.
Partner with engineering, security, and operations teams to establish cloud-native best practices.
Embed security, privacy, compliance, resilience, and governance into solution discovery, design, and implementation activities.
Apply Secure-by-Design and Security-by-Default principles throughout the software lifecycle.
Conduct threat modelling, risk analysis, and security architecture reviews.
Design secure authentication, authorisation, encryption, secrets management, and data protection controls.
Partner with Security and Risk teams to ensure compliance with enterprise standards.
Promote DevSecOps practices including automated security testing, vulnerability management, dependency validation, policy enforcement, and continuous compliance.
AI-Assisted & Agentic Engineering

Leverage AI-assisted engineering to accelerate discovery, development, testing, troubleshooting, documentation, and operational support.
Establish responsible AI guardrails covering governance, accountability, security, and data protection.
Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and their practical application within enterprise environments.
Establish reusable engineering patterns, accelerators, frameworks, and implementation blueprints.
Improve software quality through automation, testing, observability, operational readiness, and engineering standards.
Create enterprise assets that can be adopted beyond a single initiative.
Drive standardisation through implementation and enablement.
Team Enablement & Capability Building

Work directly with delivery teams throughout implementation.
Enable permanent teams to independently operate and evolve delivered capabilities.
Communicate technical decisions in terms of business value, customer impact, risk, speed, and investment efficiency.
Help leaders make informed technology investment decisions.
Provide clarity on risks, constraints, priorities, and delivery strategies.
Ability to move from need problem capability solution implementation .
Software Engineering & Architecture

Strong software engineering experience in Python, TypeScript, Java, or equivalent technologies.
Experience designing and developing distributed systems and production-grade applications.
Deep understanding of enterprise architecture, microservices architecture, distributed systems, and modern software design principles.
Experience building scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems.
Cloud Engineering

Strong experience designing and delivering solutions on AWS and/or Azure.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, Kubernetes, containerisation, cloud automation, and deployment pipelines.
Strong understanding of observability, reliability engineering, monitoring, logging, tracing, and operational excellence.
Experience designing secure and resilient cloud-native solutions.
Understanding of scalability, performance optimisation, cloud security, governance, and cost management.
Ability to design, build, deploy, and operate production-grade workloads in cloud environments.
Experience applying application security principles and secure engineering practices.
Experience implementing DevSecOps and automated governance controls.
Ability to balance security, compliance, risk, usability, and delivery speed.
AI-Assisted Engineering

Hands-on experience using AI-assisted engineering tools within software delivery workflows.
Knowledge of responsible AI practices, governance, and risk management.
Increased engineering velocity through modern engineering and AI-assisted practices.
Reduced complexity, technical debt, and operational risk.
Successful transition of ownership to permanent teams.
Not a traditional Software Engineer.
Not a Project Manager.
Not a Permanent Product Team Owner.
Not an AI Tool Specialist.
Focus: Business Outcomes, Engineering Execution, Cloud Engineering, Secure-by-Design Delivery, AI-Assisted Engineering, and Organisational Enablement.

At Pearson, our purpose is simple: to help people realize the life they imagine through learning. We believe that every learning opportunity is a chance for a personal breakthrough. We are the world's lifelong learning company. We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status or any other group protected by law. We actively seek qualified candidates who are protected veterans and individuals with disabilities as defined under VEVRAA and Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act.

If you are an individual with a disability and are unable or limited in your ability to use or access our career site as a result of your disability, you may request reasonable accommodations by emailing [HIDDEN TEXT].

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Workplace Type: Hybrid