Senior Applied AI Systems Engineer, End-to-End

Pearson; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson is seeking a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design, build, and continuously improve AI systems supporting next-gen K–12 assessment and learning. The role blends AI science with psychometrics and content development, partnering with software engineers to integrate capabilities into the Pearson assessment authoring system.

You will design modular AI architectures, evaluate models against ground truth, and collaborate with AI science colleagues and domain experts to ensure

Qualifications

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, AI, ML, Statistics or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience designing and building complete AI or ML systems end-to-end.
• Strong breadth across predictive ML, statistical learning, retrieval-grounded systems, and agentic models.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating probabilistic systems against ground truth or expert judgment.
• Experience with knowledge graphs and knowledge-grounded AI to contribute to architecture decisions.
• Strong Python proficiency; TypeScript experience or ability to learn quickly in a TS codebase.
• Track record of innovation with sound technical judgment and autonomy.
• Ability to collaborate with engineers and domain experts to translate expertise into requirements and criteria.

Responsibilities

• Design complete, modular AI systems spanning data inputs, retrieval, models, agents, tools, deterministic services, human review, evaluation, and integration.
• Break complex problems into the right mix of ML, statistics, retrieval, graph reasoning, and deterministic software.
• Build working systems and reference implementations with software engineers for integration into the assessment authoring system.
• Design architectures that evolve as models, data, and evaluation evidence change.
• Design and implement agentic and multi-step workflows using models, tools, retrieval, and structured outputs.
• Develop knowledge-grounded systems using graph, semantic, vector, and hybrid retrieval.

Skills

Python proficiency

TypeScript

ML system design

Evaluation against ground truth

Autonomy

Collaboration

Education

Advanced degree in CS/AI/ML/Statistics or related field

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Go

PostgreSQL

Graph data stores

MLflow

AWS

Job description

Pearson is seeking a Lead Specialist, Applied AI Systems Engineer to design, build, and continuously improve AI systems supporting next-gen K–12 assessment and learning. The role blends AI science with psychometrics and content development, partnering with software engineers to integrate capabilities into the Pearson assessment authoring system.

You will design modular AI architectures, evaluate models against ground truth, and collaborate with AI science colleagues and domain experts to ensure