Staff Software Engineer

Job Title: Staff Software Engineer

Job Description: Are you the engineer who sets where an agentic platform is going proves the next wave of technology by building it and lifts every engineer around youwhile still shipping the hardest parts yourself This role exists to do three things at once: architect the platforms future state bring cutting-edge and market-trending technology into Pearson through POCs and MVPs and mentor the engineers who build alongside you.

Join our AgentOps Engineering team and shape the platform that powers agent crews running across the business. Its a hands-on Staff-level role balanced across building technical leadership and proving new technology. Youll define where orchestration runtime skills and evaluation are headingand prove your decisions with reference implementations and working prototypes not just diagrams. Through this youll help teams across Pearson put dependable AI agents to work and help people realize the lives they imagine through learning.

This role aligns to industry job titles such as Agentops Engineer Staff Engineer- Agentic Systems

Work Location/s:Bengaluru India

Set the technical direction for Agentic AI at Pearson as part of the AgentOps Engineering team. Inspire innovation. Empower learning.

Pearson the worlds leading learning company is hiring a Staff Engineer to architect the future of our AgentOps Engineering platform prove out emerging technology and grow the engineers around themwhile staying hands-on in the code.

As a senior technical leader on the AgentOps Engineering team and at Pearson you will be expected to embody and role model our leadership dimensions:

• Live Our Purpose: You connect technical direction to Pearsons mission and strategy and help others see the same line.

• Simplify the Complexity: You set direction in a fast-changing field distilling complex agentic systems into clear reliable architecture others can build on.

• Carry Our Culture: You lead through design and code reviews mentor engineers and raise the bar without authoritybuilding an inclusive high-performing team.

• Deliver Results: You set the quality bar own the hardest technical outcomes and ship the patterns the platform depends on.

• Architect the future state

  • Own where the platform is goingdefine the target-state architecture for orchestration runtime skills and tools and evaluation and the roadmap of patterns and standards that gets there.

  • Make and document the hard trade-offs across quality latency cost resilience and maintainability; prove your decisions with reference implementations not just diagrams.

• Scout and prove emerging technology

  • Track the fast-moving agentic-AI landscapenew frameworks models protocols and techniquesand judge whats worth Pearsons investment.

  • De-risk the promising bets by building them: rapid POCs and MVPs that prove value expose limits and create a clear path from prototype to production.

• Design and build the platform

  • Design multi-agent and digital-worker orchestration patternsdelegation cyclic and stateful workflows reflection recovery and adaptive executionand build the hardest pieces yourself.

  • Define how routing works across the platformintent classification capability-based dispatch fallback escalationand the reusable components behind it.

  • Design long-running resumable workflows (checkpointing persistence context restoration) and resilience patterns for non-deterministic AI; set the standards for safe agent write actionsidempotency human-in-the-loop gates structured outputs audit-ready logging.

• Define skills tools and evaluation

  • Establish how skills and tools are built exposed discovered versioned and consumed and drive tool/context interoperability standards across the platform.

  • Define how the platform evaluates agentstask success groundedness tool-use accuracy schema conformance regression against golden fixturesand instrument deep tracing and observability.

• Mentor and raise the bar

  • Grow IC20IC25 engineers through design and code reviews pairing and hands-on guidance; this is a core reason the role exists not a side duty.

  • Multiply the teams output through reusable patterns shared libraries and the prompts and workflows you put into everyones hands; make AI-pair-programming a high-leverage high-quality default.

• A Staff-level engineer who sets technical direction and writes the hardest codearchitecture without hands-on depth isnt this role.

• A forward-looking architect who can see where the platform should go and prove the path with working prototypes.

• A mentor who grows other engineers and lifts the whole teams barthrough influence not authority.

• Someone with deep trade-off judgment across quality latency cost resilience and maintainability.

(we hire for demonstrated skill not years on a résumé)

• Youve designed and built production-grade agentic systemsarchitecture you proved by shipping it.

• You scout emerging technology and de-risk it through rapid POCs and MVPs that lead somewhere real.

• Deep Python and backend/platform engineeringasync services typed code and clean scalable architecture.

• You set patterns and standards others adopt: orchestration agent tooling runtime and resilience for non-deterministic AI.

• You design and build agent orchestration and routing across frameworksdelegation retries fallback structured outputs human-in-the-loop.

• You own a real platform codebase end-to-endAPIs runtime storageand raise its engineering bar.

• Strong prompt engineering for structured outputs nested schemas and multi-agent coordination.

• You mentor engineers and lead through design and code reviews without managing them.

• Experience defining evaluation strategy for agentic systemsgroundedness tool-use accuracy regression suites.

• Experience with tool/context interoperability protocols (such as MCP).

• Deep experience with a major cloud platform (AWS preferred) containerization CI/CD and state stores for orchestration and persistence.

• AI observability and evaluation tooling for LLM systems.

• RAG and memory patterns: vector databases hybrid retrieval re-ranking and grounding.

• Secure execution sandboxing and prompt-injection mitigation.

• A front-row seat setting the technical direction of enterprise agentic AI infrastructure teams across Pearson rely on.

• A mandate to explore the frontier of agentic AI and bring the best of it into production.

• Real ownership of the architecture standards and patterns that define the platform.

• A collaborative inclusive and innovation-driven culture with access to cutting-edge tools and thought leadership.

At Pearson we dont just build careerswe accelerate them. Known for our strong culture of internal mobility and leadership development we offer a clear path to broader technical leadership.

We believe great work deserves great rewards. Thats why we offer some of the most competitive benefits in the industrydesigned to support the diverse needs of our people and their families. Explore our Benefits.

At Pearson were reimagining learning through technology. If you set the technical bar build with craft and want to shape how an enterprise puts AI agents to work at scalewed love to hear from you.

Apply today and imagine the impact you can make.