Senior Software Engineer BackendPlatform Engineering – AIFirst (Agentic + GenAI + RAG)
Department:
Job Summary
Pearson is building the next generation of AIenabled platforms from enterprise copilots and assistants to AIpowered content creation discovery and analytics. Were looking for engineers who love shipping production systems and want to work at the intersection of backend engineering applied AI.
This advert covers multiple approved roles across Pearson. The exact team you join may vary but the work is aligned to one theme: building reliable scalable AI systems that real teams and products depend on.
The kind of problems youll solve
Depending on the role you may work on one (or more) of these areas:
1) Enterprise Agentic Solutions (Microsoft stack)
Build copilots assistants and intelligent workflows using Azure OpenAI/Azure AI including RAG with Azure AI Search and integrations into Microsoft tools (Teams/Power Platform).
2) PAICE Content Gen AI Platform (GenAI engine)
Build and operate the services behind Pearsons generative AI ecosystem orchestration across foundation models guardrails analytics and multitenant APIs that serve many internal consumers.
3) PAICE PRIZM (Discovery distribution & analytics)
Build distributed services that power AIenhanced content discovery delivery and analytics at scale with strong engineering fundamentals production ownership and mentoring. PRIZM is positioned internally as a content discovery/distribution/analytics ecosystem within PAICE.
4) Cloud AI Backend Engineering (AWS Java/Python)
Build highperformance backend services in Java/Spring Boot Python on AWS integrating LLMs RAG concepts and modern AIassisted development tools while delivering scalable APIs and microservices.
What youll do (core themes across all roles)
- Build and maintain backend services and REST APIs that support AI functionality
- Implement RAG pipelines and integrate with enterprise data sources where required
- Design for reliability performance cost and observability (these are production roles)
- Implement strong engineering practices: testing CI/CD security-by-design documentation
- Use AI in your daily workflow (agentic coding assistants AIassisted debugging/testing) these roles expect it as standard practice
What were looking for
We dont expect everyone to match everything but we do need strong engineering fundamentals plus real AI exposure.
Musthave (all roles)
- Strong experience building distributed backend services and APIs
- Handson experience with AI/LLM integration in production or building systems that consume/produce AI outputs
- Understanding of prompting/output validation and practical AI tradeoffs (latency cost quality)
- Comfort working in cloud environments (Azure and/or AWS)
Likely stack alignment (varies by lane)
- Azure lane: Azure OpenAI / Azure AI services RAG with Azure AI Search Teams/Power Platform integrations
- PAICE/PRIZM lanes: Java 11 and Spring Boot; strong API discipline; platform services at scale. PAICE is described internally as a suite of enterprise services hosted in AWS for content creation and delivery.
AWS lane: Java/Spring Boot Python; AWS services; microservices; NoSQL exposure (where required)
Required Experience:
Senior IC
Key Skills
About Company
Pearson is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a member of E-Verify. Employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit and business need. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, ethnicity, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gen ... View more