Staff Software Engineer

Pearson•Hoboken, NJ

5d•$150,000 - $180,000

About The Position

Pearson's PSG-CP (Pearson Software Group - Content Platform) team is looking for a forward deployed engineer who shows up where the work is happening, listens to a problem that nobody has fully written down yet, and leaves with software that addresses it. You will embed directly with our most strategic internal lines of business to drive AI adoption and ship working software against real problems. You will operate autonomously, thrive under ambiguity, and represent PSG-CP at the highest level inside the business. This is a significant responsibility — you'll play a key role in how AI shows up across Pearson.

Requirements

8+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with meaningful time spent shipping production systems end to end.
Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and system design.
Frontend depth in modern React, TypeScript, component architecture, and state management.
Backend depth in Node.JS, Java, and Python, including API design, data modeling, auth, and error handling.
Production LLM experience, including advanced prompt engineering, agent development, evaluation frameworks, retrieval, and deployment at scale.
Fluency with AI-assisted development tools and agentic coding, with a demonstrated process for delivering measurable results.
Data fluency, including databases and Python data tooling.
Cloud and deployment fluency in AWS, GCP, or Azure, including CI/CD, containers, and observability.
Integration experience, including SSO, OAuth, third-party APIs, internal platforms, and legacy databases.
High agency: ability to navigate ambiguity and make decisions autonomously.
High cooperation and low ego.
Communication skills effective with executives, engineers, and end users.
Stay current with the frontier of LLM capabilities, agent patterns, and AI product stacks.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent combination of education, training, and professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Background as a technical founder, FDE, or software engineer with consulting experience.

Responsibilities

Work directly with internal stakeholders inside different lines of business to understand their pain points, workflows, and current technical landscape, then design and build systems end to end for them.
Conduct real discovery by sitting with users, watching them work, asking questions, and translating insights into buildable solutions.
Build the first version of software during conversations, providing users with working software to react to quickly.
Process messy inputs such as spreadsheets, PDFs, screenshots, recorded calls, and documents to create coherent solutions.
Ship production AI applications on top of frontier LLMs, agents, MCP servers, evaluation harnesses, retrieval systems, and custom skills.
Iterate rapidly across multiple engagements, adapting to shifting requirements and shipping new versions frequently.
Own the full stack, including frontend, backend, data, integrations, deployment, and observability.
Codify successful patterns, prompt structures, evaluation harnesses, agent templates, etc., and push them back to platform and engineering teams to improve efficiency for other engineers.
Own the relationship with the line of business over time, identifying new opportunities and hardening solutions that graduate into production.