Senior Applied AI Systems Engineer

Pearson; Austin (TX); 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 supporting next‑gen K–12 assessment. You’ll work across Content Development, Learning Science, Technology, AI Science and Psychometrics with engineers and the AI Data & Knowledge Architect to translate assessment expertise into testable AI capabilities within our assessment authoring system.

The role spans predictive ML, statistical methods, retrieval, graph‑based approaches, generative

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or related field, or equivalent experience
• Experience designing and building complete AI/ML systems end to end
• Strong breadth across predictive ML, statistical learning, and retrieval‑grounded systems
• Demonstrated 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
• Track record of innovation with high autonomy
• Ability to collaborate with engineers and domain experts to translate expertise into requirements and evaluation criteria

Responsibilities

• Design complete, modular AI systems spanning knowledge, data inputs, retrieval, models, agents, tools, deterministic services, human review, evaluation and integration
• Break complex problems into predictive ML, statistical methods, generative models, retrieval and graph reasoning
• Build working systems and reference implementations with software engineers
• Design architectures that evolve with changing models, data and evaluation evidence
• Design and implement agentic and knowledge‑grounded AI workflows
• Develop AI capabilities for content creation, revision, verification and analytics
• Establish evaluation benches and operate evaluation datasets and protected holdout data
• Collaborate with psychometricians and content experts to translate requirements into criteria
• Monitor deployed systems for drift and failures, driving improvements
• Explore parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning and model adaptation as needed
• Ensure privacy, security, and responsible AI practices

Skills

Python proficient

TypeScript

Knowledge graphs

AI systems design

Evaluation & validation

Collaborative work with engineers

Education

Advanced degree in Computer Science / AI / Statistics

Tools

AWS

PostgreSQL

MLflow

Graph databases

Job description

Pearson seeks a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design, build, and improve intelligent systems supporting next‑gen K–12 assessment. You’ll work across Content Development, Learning Science, Technology, AI Science and Psychometrics with engineers and the AI Data & Knowledge Architect to translate assessment expertise into testable AI capabilities within our assessment authoring system.

The role spans predictive ML, statistical methods, retrieval, graph‑based approaches, generative