Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Specialist - Software Engineering roles are among the most actively sponsored positions in the U.S. tech industry. Employers regularly file H-1B visa and O-1 visa petitions for qualified candidates, and Australian nationals can pursue the same roles through the E-3 visa with no lottery requirement. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
Find Specialist - Software Engineering JobsOverview
Showing 5 of 129+ Specialist - Software Engineering jobs
See all 129+ Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Specialist - Software Engineering roles.
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 129+ Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Specialist - Software Engineering roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Specialist - Software Engineering Jobs
Target employers with a proven H-1B filing history
Companies that have filed H-1B petitions in previous years are far more likely to sponsor again. Consistent filing history signals an established immigration process, internal legal support, and a hiring culture that accommodates international candidates in software engineering roles.
Align your degree field with your job description
H-1B specialty occupation approval depends on a direct connection between your degree field and the role. A computer science, software engineering, or information systems degree strengthens your petition. Unrelated degrees raise RFE risk even when your experience is strong.
Australian nationals should prioritize the E-3 visa
The E-3 visa has no lottery, no annual backlog, and renews indefinitely in two-year increments. For Australian software engineers, it's a significantly faster and more reliable path than H-1B, and the 10,500 annual allocation has never been fully used.
Get your LCA and offer letter in order before the interview
For E-3 applicants, the employer must file a certified Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor before your consular interview. Confirm the LCA is certified and reflects your actual job title and work location before scheduling your visa appointment.
Specialist-level titles signal higher sponsorship complexity
Roles with specialist or senior designations often involve more detailed USCIS scrutiny around specialty occupation classification. A strong support letter from your employer explaining the technical requirements and degree necessity significantly reduces the risk of a Request for Evidence.
Browse verified sponsoring employers on Migrate Mate
Migrate Mate lists software engineering roles at employers actively filing sponsorship petitions. Filtering by visa type saves time and avoids applying to companies that don't support international candidates, which is one of the most common sources of wasted effort in sponsored job searches.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a Specialist - Software Engineering role qualify as a specialty occupation for H-1B purposes?
Yes, software engineering roles consistently qualify as specialty occupations because they require at least a bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a closely related field. USCIS scrutiny increases when the job description is broad or lists degree requirements as preferred rather than required, so the employer's offer letter and support documentation need to be specific about the technical nature of the work.
What visa options exist for software engineers who don't get selected in the H-1B lottery?
Australian citizens can apply for the E-3 visa, which has no lottery and is available year-round. Candidates from any country may also qualify for the O-1A if they have demonstrable achievements in the field. Cap-exempt employers such as universities and nonprofit research organizations can sponsor H-1B visa workers outside the annual lottery entirely. Migrate Mate lists roles at employers across these visa categories.
Does my degree field need to exactly match software engineering, or will a related discipline work?
An exact match is not required, but the degree field must be directly related to the duties of the role. Computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and information technology are generally accepted. Business or communications degrees are unlikely to support a software engineering petition unless the applicant also has substantial coursework or progressive experience that bridges the gap, which USCIS evaluates case by case.
How common is H-1B sponsorship for Specialist - Software Engineering roles specifically?
Software engineering is one of the highest-volume H-1B categories in DOL disclosure data. Large technology employers, financial services firms, and consulting companies file thousands of petitions annually for engineering titles at the specialist level. Sponsorship is broadly available at established companies, though smaller startups may lack the internal infrastructure to support petitions without outside immigration counsel.
Can I switch employers while on an H-1B in a software engineering role?
Yes. H-1B portability allows you to change employers once your new employer files an H-1B transfer petition and you begin working for them. You don't need to wait for the petition to be approved before starting. The new role must also qualify as a specialty occupation, which is straightforward for most software engineering positions at the specialist level.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Specialist - Software Engineering jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.