Lead AI Systems Engineer, Knowledge-Grounded & Evaluation

Pearson; Annapolis (MD); On-site; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual incentive program

Job summary

Pearson seeks a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design and build intelligent systems for next‑gen K–12 assessment. You will collaborate with software engineers, AI data architects, and content teams to turn measurement expertise into testable AI capabilities within the assessment authoring system.

You will work across predictive ML, retrieval-based methods, graph reasoning, and deterministic software to create reliable, evaluated AI solutions.

Qualifications

• Advanced degree or equivalent experience in CS, AI, ML, statistics, or related field.
• Experience designing and building complete AI/ML systems end-to-end.
• Experience evaluating probabilistic systems against ground truth or expert judgment.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and knowledge-grounded AI.
• Strong Python proficiency; TypeScript experience or ability to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

• Design modular AI systems spanning data inputs, retrieval, models, and evaluation.
• Build working systems and reference implementations with engineers, integrate into assessment authoring.
• Develop agentic workflows using models, tools, retrieval, state, and human decision points.
• Develop knowledge-grounded systems using graph, semantic, vector, and hybrid retrieval.
• Design evaluation benches, datasets, and held-out data with psychometric input.
• Collaborate with AI scientists, psychometricians, and content teams to align criteria.
• Monitor model performance, drift, and failure modes; drive improvements.
• Ensure AI is transparent, auditable, and supports human expertise.

Skills

End-to-end AI systems

Predictive ML

Statistical learning

Evaluation datasets

Knowledge graphs

Python

TypeScript

Graph retrieval

Agentic AI

Hybrid retrieval

Education domain knowledge

collaboration

Education

Advanced degree in Computer Science / AI / Statistics or related field

Job description

Pearson seeks a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design and build intelligent systems for next‑gen K–12 assessment. You will collaborate with software engineers, AI data architects, and content teams to turn measurement expertise into testable AI capabilities within the assessment authoring system.

You will work across predictive ML, retrieval-based methods, graph reasoning, and deterministic software to create reliable, evaluated AI solutions.