About this role
Pearson Virtual Schools serves K-12 students and their teachers on Connexus, a large-scale student, curriculum, and assessment data platform. You will manage engineers building and operating that platform and the products on top of it.
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.
The platform is becoming agentic across every exposed product area, not only in the teams whose names say AI. That changes what an engineering manager is accountable for. Wherever your team's surface reaches a student, a family, a teacher, or school staff, you own the guardrails, the human-in-the-loop fallback, the disclosure, and the evidence that the behavior was evaluated before release. That obligation does not vary by team.
You are expected to be AI-native in how you manage. That means you can read the work of engineers operating at our bar for AI-fluent engineering, you know what an evaluation set is worth and what it is not, and you hold quality as a gate rather than a phase. A good deal of the code your team is accountable for will not be typed by hand.
Key Responsibilities
Team Delivery and Operating Rhythm
• Allocate daily work, provide immediate support, and keep the delivery schedule reliable
• Give feedback in the moment, and escalate an unresolved issue early rather than absorbing it
• Own onboarding and ramp for new team members, and shorten it deliberately
Holding the Shape of the Team
• Hire against our bar for AI-fluent engineering, and hold it when the pipeline is thin
Agentic Capability and Duty of Care
• Treat every exposed product surface as one that will carry agentic capability, and apply the same obligations whether or not the team's name says AI
• Require an evaluation set with a stated pass bar, wired into the release gate, before model-backed behavior reaches a student
• Ensure guardrails, human-in-the-loop fallback, escalation, and disclosure are designed into the interaction rather than added after a complaint
• Monitor reliability, hallucination, and model performance against stated thresholds, and treat drift as a defect rather than as news
Quality, Adoption, and Shared Tooling
• 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 run and are not routinely overridden, and treat a suite that never fails as a defect rather than a result
• Drive the team's contribution to the governed shared library, so skills, MCP servers, evaluation suites, and golden datasets leave the team rather than staying in it
People and Capability
• Coach on the job, in the work, rather than in a scheduled session about the work
• Hold process adherence where it matters and challenge it where it does not
• Recognize contribution specifically, so the team knows what good looked like
Domain Depth for This Posting
• Build and maintain team-level understanding of Connexus data foundations, including student, enrollment, curriculum, assessment, progress, attendance, and school operations data, so delivery decisions are grounded in the domain.
• Lead the team's migration and cutover execution for assigned domains, including legacy behavior analysis, reconciliation, rollback planning, dependency coordination, and production-readiness validation.
• Guide engineers in translating legacy SQL Server, stored procedure, and .NET behavior into durable PostgreSQL schemas, APIs, events, and domain contracts, while ensuring designs are reviewed and understood across dependent teams.
• Apply policy-aware data access expectations for K-12 education systems, including FERPA-sensitive data boundaries, externalized authorization, and audit-ready controls, through planning, delivery reviews, and release readiness.
Preferred Qualifications
• 2+ years managing engineers who ship to production, including hiring, performance, and development
• A working engineering background, enough to review a technical decision and to be credible with engineers operating at our bar for AI-fluent engineering
• Experience delivering a model-backed or agentic capability to real users, including how it was evaluated before release and monitored afterward
• Practiced at holding a quality gate under delivery pressure, and able to describe a time you held one and a time you should have
• Experience managing across a legacy and a target platform at the same time, where the team cannot stop shipping on either
• Comfortable managing a distributed team across time zones, with the written discipline that requires
• 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)
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Specialist depth for this role
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Generative AI
• Evaluation of AI-Generated Content Quality
• Performance Management
• Code Review
• Overseeing delivery of AI-enabled capabilities and holding the release gate
• Measuring and reporting team adoption of AI tooling
• Building reusable engineering tooling and evaluation suites that other teams adopt