Manager, Software Engineering

Description Job Title: Engineering Manager

Career Architecture Tier: 30

Description: Engineering Manager role leading a fullstack AI-powered product squad.

Location: Remote in Spain or Poland

Job Summary:

Speaking Tutor is an AI-powered conversational practice product that helps students build real English-speaking confidence. Students engage in adaptive AI conversations, receive detailed pronunciation and fluency feedback, and develop communicative competence - all in a safe, judgment-free environment.

Our first large-scale classroom research (109 students, 145 conversations, 13 teachers across Italy and Turkey) validated core product-market fit - 81% of students felt good speaking with the tool, 70% valued the personalised feedback, and teachers showed strong enthusiasm. The research also surfaced real challenges: reliability, adaptive difficulty for mixed-ability classrooms, conversation scaffolding, and AI naturality. Solving these requires an engineering leader who understands fullstack product delivery, can manage dependencies on AI systems, and empowers the team to deliver at their best work.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager who is a force multiplier: someone who can lead a fullstack squad through an ambitious AI-product evolution, who personally uses modern AI tooling, and who raises the bar for engineering excellence.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead a fullstack squad of engineers (backend, frontend, QA) and one embedded AI engineer, owning the Speaking Tutor product end-to-end. Dedicated AI capabilities teams own the underlying models and agents - your squad customizes and integrates them for the product.
• Own the technical strategy for the squad's product requirements: conversation quality, feedback accuracy, adaptive difficulty, scaffolding, and classroom reliability. You don't need to build the AI systems from scratch, but you need to understand the systems well enough to make good architectural and tradeoff decisions.
• Ship with velocity and rigor. Balance rapid experimentation with production stability for classrooms that depend on us.
• Champion AI-powered engineering. Use tools like Cursor and Claude Code yourself. Drive adoption across your team. Set the standard for how AI tooling accelerates everything - from code generation to testing to design-to-code workflows.
• Partner with Product and Research. Translate user research into technical roadmap decisions. Own feasibility analysis and trade-off conversations.
• Grow your people. Run effective 1:1s. Coach engineers on craft and career. Build an environment where people do their best work. The team is fully staffed today - if the product succeeds commercially in market, you'll own scaling the team further.
• Drive Engineering Excellence - observability, CI/CD, testing strategies, incident response, and more.

Required Skills and Competencies:

• 5+ years of engineering experience with hands-on fullstack or backend work in production systems.
• 2+ years leading a cross-functional engineering team.
• Experience delivering products that depend on AI/ML systems - you've managed squads that integrate LLMs, speech recognition, or similar technologies, even if you didn't build the models yourself. You have a working understanding of AI systems and agentic workflows.
• Daily user of AI development tools. You work with Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or equivalent and can demonstrate using them effectively. You'll be asked to show this in the interview.
• Strong product instinct. You've partnered closely with product managers and can form your own technical opinions from research data.
• Comfort with ambiguity. AI-product development means experiments that fail and problems without known solutions. You thrive in this.
• Fluent English - spoken and written.

Qualifications (Education \& Experience):

• 5+ years of relevant professional experience in engineering, with hands-on fullstack or backend work in production systems.
• 2+ years leading a cross-functional engineering team.

Interview Process:

Three rounds. 2.45 hours total.

• Round 1 – Hiring Manager Call (1 hour): Leadership, engineering culture, and a short live exercise with AI tooling.
• Round 2 – Technical \& System Design (1 hour): Call with an engineer from the team. Frontend, backend, and architectural discussions.
• Round 3 – Product \& Stakeholder Alignment (45 min): With the Product Manager. Prioritization, cross-functional collaboration, and navigating trade-offs between product and engineering.

Who we are:

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. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. 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 [email protected].

#L1-CM

Who we are:

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. For us, learning isn't just what we do. It's who we are. To learn more: We are Pearson.

Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. 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 [email protected].

Job: Engineering

Job Family: TECHNOLOGY

Organization: English Language Learning

Schedule: FULL_TIME

Workplace Type: Remote

Req ID: 24029

#LI-REMOTE