AI Product Engineer
First seen by Alion on Oct 25, 2026.
Location: Remote (India-based), Bengaluru preferred, with daily overlap with our UK and US teams
Engagement Type: Contract-to-hire, 3 months then ongoing
Reports to: CEOAbout MarcoPolo LearningMarcoPolo Learning is a leading provider of innovative content, technology, and instructional support for early childhood education. Since 2013, we’ve impacted thousands of classrooms and hundreds of thousands of families across North America. Our Emmy-nominated MarcoPolo World School app and The Polos TV series bring STEM and global discovery to life for young learners.
Backed by top-tier investors, we’re on a mission to transform early learning at scale. At the center of that mission is Audrey, our AI Teaching Companion & Coach for early-learning educators.
Role OverviewWe’re looking for an AI Product Engineer who builds with AI by default and cares deeply about the product. You’ll partner closely with our CEO to shape and move Audrey forward. You’ll turn ideas into clear decisions, then build them end to end alongside a small, collaborative engineering team.
This role suits someone who leads through clarity and trust, brings people with them, and helps the whole team do its best work.
Key Responsibilities- Partner with the CEO on product direction: shape priorities, test assumptions, and turn ideas into clear, buildable plans.
- Design and build AI features end to end, including prompts and agents, retrieval, and the experience around them.
- Put evaluation and testing in place so AI quality is measurable and keeps improving.
- Ship full-stack features across front end, back end and cloud deployment.
- Work hand in hand with fellow engineers: share context, pair on problems, and help everyone get more from AI tools.
- Communicate progress, risks and trade-offs early and clearly.
- Build with privacy and safety in mind, including FERPA/COPPA alignment.
What Success Looks Like in the First 90 Days
- First 30 days: learn the product, the teachers who use it and the team; get hands-on and ship a first improvement.
- By 60 days: own a meaningful part of the AI experience and deliver improvements on agreed timelines.
- By 90 days: help shape the next phase of the product roadmap with the CEO.
- 5–8 years of full-stack software engineering: React/TypeScript front end; Node.js or Python back end; AWS.
- You’ve personally built and shipped at least one production LLM application used by real users. What you’ve built matters more to us than years on a résumé.
- Hands-on experience with prompt and agent design, RAG (embeddings, vector search, re-ranking), and evaluating LLM output quality.
- An AI-native way of working: you use AI tools every day and can show the speed it gives you.
- Leadership capability: you’ve owned a product area or driven product decisions, and you influence through ideas, trust and collaboration.
- A genuine product mindset: you’re curious about the teachers who use what you build, and you let that shape your work.
- A collaborative style: you make the people around you better and handle different viewpoints with tact.
- Self-directed: you move work forward with minimal oversight and speak up early when things go off track.
- Clear written and spoken English; comfortable with technical and non-technical colleagues across UK and US time zones.
- Bonus: ed-tech or early-childhood experience; FERPA/COPPA familiarity; early-stage startup experience.
Be ready to walk us through an LLM feature you shipped: what you decided, how you built it, how you measured quality, and what you’d do differently. The process includes a paid take-home build exercise (AI tools encouraged). Sanitized examples are welcome; please don’t share confidential employer or customer information.
What We Offer- Fully remote role with flexibility over how you structure your day.
- Ownership of the AI experience in a flagship product, with real influence over its direction.
- Direct work with the CEO and a real voice in product decisions.
- A collaborative, family-friendly, mission-driven environment at the intersection of education, media, and technology.
This is a rare chance to shape the AI product of a growing global education company at a defining moment, and to help take Audrey into thousands of classrooms. If you want work that’s visible, technically meaningful, and genuinely useful for young learners and their teachers, this is it.
Note: This is an India-based engagement. Applicants must have the right to work in India; visa sponsorship is not available at this time.
MarcoPolo Learning is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.
Originally posted on Himalayas