H-1B Visa Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs
Specialist - Software Engineering roles sit squarely within H-1B visa specialty occupation territory, requiring at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a directly related field. Employers file an LCA with the DOL before petitioning USCIS, and the 85,000-slot annual cap means timing your job search around the April lottery window matters.
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Get Access To All JobsThe Role
As an Advanced Specialist in Software Engineering, you will serve as a senior technical owner and hands-on engineer responsible for designing, building, operating, and evolving scalable software solutions for complex business and engineering challenges.
This is a full-stack engineering role with a strong emphasis on backend development, distributed systems, event-driven and stream-processing systems, cloud-native architecture predominantly on AWS, and service reliability. You will lead significant engineering initiatives from initial discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, operationalization, and ongoing support.
The role is equally focused on developing new product capabilities and strengthening, maintaining, and operationalizing existing features. Given the maturity and lifecycle of the platform, you will work on modernization, technical debt reduction, production reliability, performance improvement, and long-term maintainability alongside new feature delivery.
You will work closely with product managers, architects, engineering leaders, and teams across multiple domains to translate business needs into practical, scalable, and maintainable technical solutions. Documentation, technical communication, and collaboration across globally distributed organizations are essential parts of this complex role.
The ideal candidate is an experienced engineer who thrives on solving difficult problems, operates effectively in ambiguous environments, and believes in owning solutions end to end. We are looking for a highly autonomous professional who can independently drive initiatives, establish clarity where requirements are incomplete, and remain accountable for delivering high-quality outcomes.
What You'll Own
- Lead the architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operationalization, and production support of complex software systems.
- Build scalable, reliable, secure, and highly available backend services, distributed systems, event-driven applications, and stream-processing solutions.
- Own major engineering initiatives from technical discovery and solution definition through delivery, production rollout, and ongoing support.
- Balance the delivery of new product capabilities with modernization, technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and maintenance of existing systems.
- Partner with product, architecture, platform, security, operations, development, and other solution teams to translate business requirements into practical technical approaches.
- Develop and communicate technical proposals that clearly explain solution architecture, implementation decisions, expected outcomes, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
- Lead technical discovery sessions, architecture reviews, system design discussions, and implementation planning for complex initiatives.
- Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, streaming applications, and cloud-native services that can evolve with changing product and platform needs.
- Evaluate existing platform capabilities, shared services, and APIs before introducing new solutions, ensuring alignment with broader enterprise architecture.
- Create proof-of-concept solutions to validate technical approaches and evolve successful prototypes into secure, maintainable, and production-ready capabilities.
- Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations, ensuring development activities are coordinated and delivered with high quality.
- Work independently, navigate ambiguity, identify the appropriate path forward, and drive initiatives to completion with limited oversight.
- Mentor engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, troubleshooting, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of engineering best practices.
- Establish and promote standards for code quality, automated testing, observability, resiliency, security, documentation, and operational readiness.
- Produce clear and maintainable technical documentation, including system designs, architecture decisions, workflows, operational runbooks, troubleshooting guidance, and engineering standards.
- Drive continuous improvement across software development, delivery, deployment, maintenance, and production support practices.
- Take ownership of production systems, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, performance optimization, and implementation of long-term corrective actions.
- Operate effectively in a 24/7 production environment and understand the responsibility associated with supporting business-critical software platforms.
- Stay current with advancements in cloud computing, distributed systems, software architecture, artificial intelligence, and engineering productivity.
- Evaluate and responsibly adopt AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities where they improve solution quality, developer productivity, operational efficiency, or customer outcomes.
- Contribute to an AI-native engineering culture by applying AI capabilities throughout appropriate stages of discovery, design, development, testing, documentation, deployment, and operational support.
About You
You are an experienced software engineer and technical leader who combines deep backend engineering knowledge with strong ownership, sound technical judgment, and effective communication.
You are highly autonomous and comfortable independently driving complex initiatives. You can navigate ambiguity, identify missing requirements, evaluate technical and business trade-offs, and establish a practical path toward delivery.
You are willing to take on difficult challenges and remain accountable throughout the entire lifecycle of a solution, from discovery and design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and production support.
You are equally comfortable developing new functionality and improving existing systems. You understand that mature products require continued investment in reliability, observability, performance, modernization, technical debt reduction, documentation, and operational excellence.
You work effectively across organizational and technical boundaries, influence decisions through expertise and collaboration, and explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Required Experience and Skills
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline. A master’s degree is a plus.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience designing, developing, and operating backend systems.
- Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior engineer for complex, cross-functional software initiatives.
- Deep knowledge of backend engineering concepts, including distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency, consistency, event processing, and performance.
- Strong programming experience with at least one modern, strongly typed language, such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
- Experience designing and building microservices, RESTful APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven architectures, streaming systems, and integration services.
- Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native engineering, including several of the following:
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon ECS or EKS
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon SQS and SNS
- Amazon EventBridge
- Amazon MSK
- AWS Step Functions
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon RDS or Aurora
- Amazon Neptune
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Infrastructure as Code
- Experience designing systems using serverless, containerized, microservice-based, and event-driven architectures.
- Experience working with relational, NoSQL, graph, and streaming data technologies, including data modeling, scalable access patterns, and performance optimization.
- Strong understanding of API design, system integration, authentication, authorization, application security, and data protection principles.
- Experience with automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with continuous integration and delivery practices.
- Experience implementing observability using structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and proactive alerting.
- Experience diagnosing complex production issues, conducting root-cause analysis, and improving system reliability across distributed applications.
- Proven ability to create technical documentation, architecture diagrams, design proposals, operational runbooks, and engineering best-practice guidance.
- Experience building proof-of-concept solutions and successfully evolving them into scalable, production-ready systems.
- Experience maintaining and modernizing mature software platforms with significant operational, support, and technical debt considerations.
- Experience working in Agile development environments and coordinating engineering delivery across globally distributed teams.
- Demonstrated ability to independently manage work, make informed technical decisions, navigate uncertainty, and drive initiatives through completion.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to engineering leaders, product partners, and business stakeholders.
AI and Modern Engineering Capabilities
- Demonstrated ability to use AI-assisted engineering tools to improve solution analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and developer productivity.
- Familiarity with agentic AI technologies, including AI agents, tool-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, model integration, and AI-enabled automation.
- Familiarity with the AI Development Lifecycle, or AI-DLC, including the responsible application of AI throughout discovery, design, development, validation, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
What Success Looks Like
Success in this role means taking end-to-end ownership of complex engineering initiatives and consistently delivering secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions. You will successfully balance new feature development with the modernization, operational support, and continued improvement of existing capabilities. You will bring technical clarity to ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions, raise engineering standards, and help teams deliver with greater quality and confidence. Beyond writing code, you will ensure that solutions are well designed, thoroughly tested, observable, documented, operationally ready, and aligned with the long-term direction of the platform. You will also contribute to building a strong engineering culture by mentoring others, promoting collaboration, and responsibly adopting AI-assisted and agentic technologies where they create meaningful value.
Compensation
The minimum full-time salary range is between $125,000 - $175,000.
This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.
Applications will be accepted through 15th August. This window may be extended depending on business needs.
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 TalentExperienceGlobalTeam@grp.pearson.com.
Job: Engineering
Job Family: TECHNOLOGY
Organization: Higher Education
Schedule: FULL_TIME
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Req ID: 25308
The Role
As an Advanced Specialist in Software Engineering, you will serve as a senior technical owner and hands-on engineer responsible for designing, building, operating, and evolving scalable software solutions for complex business and engineering challenges.
This is a full-stack engineering role with a strong emphasis on backend development, distributed systems, event-driven and stream-processing systems, cloud-native architecture predominantly on AWS, and service reliability. You will lead significant engineering initiatives from initial discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, operationalization, and ongoing support.
The role is equally focused on developing new product capabilities and strengthening, maintaining, and operationalizing existing features. Given the maturity and lifecycle of the platform, you will work on modernization, technical debt reduction, production reliability, performance improvement, and long-term maintainability alongside new feature delivery.
You will work closely with product managers, architects, engineering leaders, and teams across multiple domains to translate business needs into practical, scalable, and maintainable technical solutions. Documentation, technical communication, and collaboration across globally distributed organizations are essential parts of this complex role.
The ideal candidate is an experienced engineer who thrives on solving difficult problems, operates effectively in ambiguous environments, and believes in owning solutions end to end. We are looking for a highly autonomous professional who can independently drive initiatives, establish clarity where requirements are incomplete, and remain accountable for delivering high-quality outcomes.
What You'll Own
- Lead the architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operationalization, and production support of complex software systems.
- Build scalable, reliable, secure, and highly available backend services, distributed systems, event-driven applications, and stream-processing solutions.
- Own major engineering initiatives from technical discovery and solution definition through delivery, production rollout, and ongoing support.
- Balance the delivery of new product capabilities with modernization, technical debt reduction, reliability improvements, and maintenance of existing systems.
- Partner with product, architecture, platform, security, operations, development, and other solution teams to translate business requirements into practical technical approaches.
- Develop and communicate technical proposals that clearly explain solution architecture, implementation decisions, expected outcomes, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs.
- Lead technical discovery sessions, architecture reviews, system design discussions, and implementation planning for complex initiatives.
- Design APIs, microservices, asynchronous workflows, event-driven systems, streaming applications, and cloud-native services that can evolve with changing product and platform needs.
- Evaluate existing platform capabilities, shared services, and APIs before introducing new solutions, ensuring alignment with broader enterprise architecture.
- Create proof-of-concept solutions to validate technical approaches and evolve successful prototypes into secure, maintainable, and production-ready capabilities.
- Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineering teams across onshore and offshore locations, ensuring development activities are coordinated and delivered with high quality.
- Work independently, navigate ambiguity, identify the appropriate path forward, and drive initiatives to completion with limited oversight.
- Mentor engineers through technical design guidance, code reviews, troubleshooting, knowledge sharing, and the adoption of engineering best practices.
- Establish and promote standards for code quality, automated testing, observability, resiliency, security, documentation, and operational readiness.
- Produce clear and maintainable technical documentation, including system designs, architecture decisions, workflows, operational runbooks, troubleshooting guidance, and engineering standards.
- Drive continuous improvement across software development, delivery, deployment, maintenance, and production support practices.
- Take ownership of production systems, including monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, performance optimization, and implementation of long-term corrective actions.
- Operate effectively in a 24/7 production environment and understand the responsibility associated with supporting business-critical software platforms.
- Stay current with advancements in cloud computing, distributed systems, software architecture, artificial intelligence, and engineering productivity.
- Evaluate and responsibly adopt AI-assisted and agentic engineering capabilities where they improve solution quality, developer productivity, operational efficiency, or customer outcomes.
- Contribute to an AI-native engineering culture by applying AI capabilities throughout appropriate stages of discovery, design, development, testing, documentation, deployment, and operational support.
About You
You are an experienced software engineer and technical leader who combines deep backend engineering knowledge with strong ownership, sound technical judgment, and effective communication.
You are highly autonomous and comfortable independently driving complex initiatives. You can navigate ambiguity, identify missing requirements, evaluate technical and business trade-offs, and establish a practical path toward delivery.
You are willing to take on difficult challenges and remain accountable throughout the entire lifecycle of a solution, from discovery and design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and production support.
You are equally comfortable developing new functionality and improving existing systems. You understand that mature products require continued investment in reliability, observability, performance, modernization, technical debt reduction, documentation, and operational excellence.
You work effectively across organizational and technical boundaries, influence decisions through expertise and collaboration, and explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Required Experience and Skills
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline. A master’s degree is a plus.
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience designing, developing, and operating backend systems.
- Demonstrated experience serving as a technical lead or senior engineer for complex, cross-functional software initiatives.
- Deep knowledge of backend engineering concepts, including distributed systems, concurrency, scalability, fault tolerance, resiliency, consistency, event processing, and performance.
- Strong programming experience with at least one modern, strongly typed language, such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, C#, Go, Rust, or TypeScript.
- Experience designing and building microservices, RESTful APIs, asynchronous workflows, event-driven architectures, streaming systems, and integration services.
- Strong experience with AWS and cloud-native engineering, including several of the following:
- AWS Lambda
- Amazon ECS or EKS
- Amazon API Gateway
- Amazon SQS and SNS
- Amazon EventBridge
- Amazon MSK
- AWS Step Functions
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon RDS or Aurora
- Amazon Neptune
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Infrastructure as Code
- Experience designing systems using serverless, containerized, microservice-based, and event-driven architectures.
- Experience working with relational, NoSQL, graph, and streaming data technologies, including data modeling, scalable access patterns, and performance optimization.
- Strong understanding of API design, system integration, authentication, authorization, application security, and data protection principles.
- Experience with automated testing, including unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with continuous integration and delivery practices.
- Experience implementing observability using structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and proactive alerting.
- Experience diagnosing complex production issues, conducting root-cause analysis, and improving system reliability across distributed applications.
- Proven ability to create technical documentation, architecture diagrams, design proposals, operational runbooks, and engineering best-practice guidance.
- Experience building proof-of-concept solutions and successfully evolving them into scalable, production-ready systems.
- Experience maintaining and modernizing mature software platforms with significant operational, support, and technical debt considerations.
- Experience working in Agile development environments and coordinating engineering delivery across globally distributed teams.
- Demonstrated ability to independently manage work, make informed technical decisions, navigate uncertainty, and drive initiatives through completion.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations to engineering leaders, product partners, and business stakeholders.
AI and Modern Engineering Capabilities
- Demonstrated ability to use AI-assisted engineering tools to improve solution analysis, design, implementation, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and developer productivity.
- Familiarity with agentic AI technologies, including AI agents, tool-based workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, model integration, and AI-enabled automation.
- Familiarity with the AI Development Lifecycle, or AI-DLC, including the responsible application of AI throughout discovery, design, development, validation, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
What Success Looks Like
Success in this role means taking end-to-end ownership of complex engineering initiatives and consistently delivering secure, scalable, reliable, and maintainable solutions. You will successfully balance new feature development with the modernization, operational support, and continued improvement of existing capabilities. You will bring technical clarity to ambiguous problems, make sound architectural decisions, raise engineering standards, and help teams deliver with greater quality and confidence. Beyond writing code, you will ensure that solutions are well designed, thoroughly tested, observable, documented, operationally ready, and aligned with the long-term direction of the platform. You will also contribute to building a strong engineering culture by mentoring others, promoting collaboration, and responsibly adopting AI-assisted and agentic technologies where they create meaningful value.
Compensation
The minimum full-time salary range is between $125,000 - $175,000.
This position is eligible to participate in an annual incentive program, and information on benefits offered is here.
Applications will be accepted through 15th August. This window may be extended depending on business needs.
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 TalentExperienceGlobalTeam@grp.pearson.com.
Job: Engineering
Job Family: TECHNOLOGY
Organization: Higher Education
Schedule: FULL_TIME
Workplace Type: Hybrid
Req ID: 25308
See all 126+ H-1B Visa Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new H-1B Visa Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding H-1B Visa Sponsorship in Specialist - Software Engineering
Align your degree to SOC codes
Software engineering roles are typically filed under SOC code 15-1252. Pull the O*NET profile for that code before interviews so you can speak precisely to how your degree field maps to the listed knowledge and skill requirements USCIS reviews.
Verify your prevailing wage tier early
Use the OFLC Wage Search to look up Level I through Level IV wages for your target metro area before negotiating. Your offered salary must meet the certified LCA wage, and a mismatch delays or derails the petition.
Target employers with cap-exempt status
Universities, nonprofit research organizations, and government entities are cap-exempt, meaning they can file your H-1B petition any time without waiting for the April lottery. Specialist-level engineering roles exist at all three employer types.
Search H-1B sponsors on Migrate Mate
Filter Migrate Mate by software engineering role to see employers with verified H-1B LCA filing history. That filing history tells you which companies have sponsored the specific occupation before, not just that they have a general visa policy.
Request premium processing at offer stage
Ask whether the employer will file Form I-907 for premium processing. USCIS adjudicates premium petitions within 15 business days, which matters if your OPT or prior status has a tight expiration window before your start date.
Document specialty occupation proactively
Collect evidence that your role requires a specific degree field, not just any bachelor's degree. Job descriptions, internal grade-level rubrics, and team org charts showing other engineers' credentials all strengthen the specialty occupation argument if USCIS issues an RFE.
H-1B Visa Specialist - Software Engineering: Frequently Asked Questions
Does a Specialist - Software Engineering title qualify as an H-1B specialty occupation?
Yes, provided the role requires at least a bachelor's degree in a directly related field such as computer science, software engineering, or information systems. The 'Specialist' designation alone doesn't determine eligibility. What matters is whether the job duties and the employer's own hiring norms establish that a specific degree is required, not merely preferred. USCIS scrutinizes this distinction closely.
What happens to my H-1B status if I get laid off from a software engineering role?
You have a 60-day grace period after your employment ends to find a new sponsoring employer, file a change of status, or leave the country. During that window you can't work, but the clock doesn't start until your last day of employment. Filing an H-1B transfer petition with a new employer within 60 days lets you start work once the petition is received by USCIS.
How do I find software engineering employers that actually sponsor H-1B visas?
Browse Migrate Mate to see software engineering roles filtered by employers with documented H-1B LCA filing history. LCA filings are public record submitted to DOL before each petition, so that data reflects real sponsorship activity rather than a stated policy. It's a faster screen than cold-applying to companies that list sponsorship as optional or case-by-case.
Can my employer file my H-1B petition if I'm currently on OPT doing software engineering work?
Yes, and if your OPT authorization is still valid when USCIS selects your registration in the lottery, cap-gap protection automatically extends your work authorization through September 30 of that year. If you're on STEM OPT, cap-gap extends further through the full H-1B start date. Your employer must file the full I-129 petition after selection to activate the extension.
Does the SOC code on my LCA affect my H-1B petition for a Specialist software engineering role?
It does, because USCIS cross-references the SOC code on the certified LCA against the O*NET job zone and typical education requirements for that occupation. Software engineering roles under SOC 15-1252 have a Job Zone 4 or 5 classification, supporting the specialty occupation argument. A mismatched SOC code between the LCA and the actual duties is a common RFE trigger.