Software Engineer III

Overview

As an Innovation Engineer at Pearson Labs, you turn ambitious ideas about the future of learning into working evidence through rapid prototyping with AI and emerging tech. You’ll develop prototypes that address learning, assessment, and work, shaping which concepts move forward. Your work influences senior leaders and business units, embedding user-centered evidence into investment decisions. This role blends hands-on engineering with experimentation in a fast, AI-native environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship prototypes to test hypotheses about learning, assessment, and work, from quick demos to multi-technology systems
• Plan and run user-first experiments with measurable objectives and clear findings
• Work hands-on with emerging tech (AI agents, multimodal models, immersive computing, knowledge graphs) and translate tech signals into learning impact
• Develop minimal viable systems quickly and add complexity only when justified by evidence
• Document results and hand over to product engineering for production, ensuring transfer of knowledge
• Collaborate with Learning Science teams, AI research, Ventures, product teams, and business units to align on problems and solutions
• Tell the story of the work through demos, technical notes, and portfolio contributions
• Operate in a fast, pragmatic stack (Claude Code, Cursor, Railway, internal hosting platforms) and measure progress against hypotheses
• Contribute to the defined innovation funnel from sensemaking through proof of concept to production readiness

Key requirements

• strong programming and prototyping skills with fluency in modern software design, APIs, and cloud deployment
• hands-on experience building with AI including LLM-powered applications, agents, or AI-assisted development workflows
• ability to generate original approaches to loosely defined problems and test multiple cheap options
• customer focus and ability to understand learner and educator problems and incorporate feedback
• systems thinking to see how technologies, products, and ecosystems interconnect
• rigor in tracking, documenting, and communicating the innovation process
• curiosity and passion for learning, with a domain interest in education
• customer focus
• creativity
• communication
• modern software design
• APIs
• cloud deployment

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