Lead AI Systems Engineer – Knowledge-Grounded & Evaluated

Pearson; Hartford (CT); On-site; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson seeks a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design, build, and improve intelligent systems for next-gen K–12 assessment and learning. The role spans knowledge-grounded AI, agentic workflows, and evaluation-driven development within the Measurement & Learning team, collaborating with software engineers and AI architects.

The candidate will deliver complete AI architectures, evaluate outputs against ground truth, and ensure alignment with psychometrics and content experts.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in CS/AI/ML or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing and building complete AI/ML systems end to end.
• Breadth across predictive ML, statistical learning, and retrieval-grounded systems.
• Experience evaluating probabilistic systems against ground truth or expert judgment.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and knowledge-grounded AI.
• Strong Python proficiency, and experience with TypeScript.
• Track record of innovating beyond established practice with high autonomy.
• Ability to collaborate with engineers and domain experts.

Responsibilities

• Design complete AI systems spanning knowledge, data inputs, retrieval, models, agents, tools, and human review.
• Break problems into combinations of ML, statistical methods, retrieval, graph reasoning, and deterministic software.
• Build working systems and reference implementations with engineers to integrate into the assessment platform.
• Design architectures that evolve with models, data, and evaluation evidence.
• Design and implement agentic and knowledge-grounded workflows and knowledge graphs.
• Develop evaluation benches and datasets with psychometricians and domain experts.
• Monitor system performance and drift, driving continuous improvement.
• Evaluate tradeoffs among prompting, retrieval, and model adaptation.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

AI/ML systems design

Collaboration with engineers

Education

Advanced degree in CS/AI/ML/Statistics

Tools

TypeScript

MLflow

PostgreSQL

Graph databases

Job description

Pearson seeks a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design, build, and improve intelligent systems for next-gen K–12 assessment and learning. The role spans knowledge-grounded AI, agentic workflows, and evaluation-driven development within the Measurement & Learning team, collaborating with software engineers and AI architects.

The candidate will deliver complete AI architectures, evaluate outputs against ground truth, and ensure alignment with psychometrics and content experts.