Software Engineer III

Job Title - Software Engineer III (Innovation Engineering)

Description - Turn ambitious ideas about the future of learning into working evidence, fast. Join Pearson Labs to prototype with AI and emerging technology, test what matters with real users and help shape where Pearson invests next. Also known in the market as: Innovation Engineer; Prototyping Engineer; Applied AI Engineer; R&D Software Engineer.

About Pearson Labs

Pearson Labs is the applied R&D function within the Office of the CTO. Our job is to explore, experiment with, and prototype emerging technologies that could transform how the world learns, is assessed, and works. Under Pearson's newly approved Innovation Architecture, Labs is part of a shared innovation capacity that business units across the company draw on to get new concepts moving fast, with rapid prototyping, early-stage technical support, and evidence that helps leaders make confident continue, pivot, or stop decisions.

This is real work with real reach. In the last year the team has run an eight-week beta with university physics educators, filed patents from prototype work, placed in company hackathons, and built everything from AI tutors and interactive learning objects to haptic hardware for skills training, smart-glasses learning experiences, room-scale immersive environments, multi-agent assessment systems, knowledge graphs, and voice agents, demoing that work to executives and customers around the world. The lab itself operates as a working customer surface: sales teams, product teams, and customers come through the space, and what we build gets used in front of them. We are customer-centric, technology-first, systems-focused, and relentlessly curious about what's next.

About the role

Most software roles are defined by a specialism. This one is defined by a contribution: taking an idea about the future of learning and turning it into working evidence, fast. Jobs across product and engineering are reshaping in the age of AI, and we think the interesting roles now organise around what you move forward rather than which discipline you sit in. In Labs, that contribution is the prototyper's: discovering what's possible, building the version that proves it, and handing it over well.

As an Innovation Engineer you will work across the Labs portfolio, building prototypes and running experiments with emerging technologies. Some weeks that means a scrappy proof of concept to answer a single question; other weeks it means carrying a validated prototype toward pilot quality with real users. You will help us answer big questions, such as:

• What will the future of learning look like?
• How can we create meaningful experiences for learners and educators through new technology?
• Which technologies will make the biggest impact in learning, assessment, and work over the next decade?

You will get unusual visibility for an engineering role: your prototypes will be seen and used by senior leaders, business units, and customers, and your evidence will directly shape where Pearson invests next.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and ship prototypes that test hypotheses about learning, assessment, and work, from quick demos to multi-technology systems piloted with real users.
• Run experiments properly: framed around a validated story, user-first, with measurable objectives and honest findings, whether the answer is yes or no.
• Work hands-on with emerging technologies, currently including AI agents, multimodal models, immersive and spatial computing, and knowledge graphs, and help the team understand what they mean for learning.
• Get to a minimal viable system quickly, keep it simple, and add complexity only when the evidence earns it.
• Tell the story of the work: demos, showcases, short technical notes, and contributions to our public portfolio site.
• Treat innovation as a team sport. You will build alongside our Learning Science teams, who ground prototypes in how people actually learn, with the other innovation teams around the business, including AI research, Ventures, and the innovation teams inside each business unit, with product teams who take our work forward, and with the business units who bring us their hardest problems.
• Document and hand over cleanly, so validated work can move into product engineering without losing what made it work.

How we work

We are an AI-native team. We build with coding agents and agentic workflows daily, and we treat AI as leverage that lets a small team cover ground that used to need a much larger one. Our stack is pragmatic and moves fast: Claude Code and Cursor, Railway, internal hosting platforms developed by our colleagues and dedicated to rapid prototyping use cases, and cloud deployment patterns designed for speed. None of it is precious; the right tool is the one that gets to evidence fastest.

Our method draws on innovation engineering practice: start with a story worth validating, put the user before the system architecture, work from the resources in front of you, break systems into simple parts, reduce the downside rather than optimise the upside, and measure progress with objectives you can actually check. Every programme runs on a hypothesis and closes with an explicit scale, pivot, or stop decision, and we record the stops as proudly as the wins, because a weak proposition stopped in time frees capacity for a strong one. Labs owns the earliest stages of Pearson's innovation funnel, from sensemaking through proof of concept, with a defined graduation into product development, so prototypes here are judged on the decisions they enable.

About you

We're looking for entrepreneurial technologists who are excited to tackle ambiguous problems with ingenuity and energy. You should have:

• Technical excellence: strong programming and prototyping skills, with working fluency in modern software design, APIs, and cloud deployment. You can take an idea to a working system on your own.
• AI fluency: genuine hands-on experience building with AI, whether that's LLM-powered applications, agents, or AI-assisted development workflows, and an appetite to keep pace as the field moves.
• Creative problem-solving: you generate original approaches to loosely defined problems and know when to test several cheaply rather than commit to one.
• Customer focus: a desire to understand the problems learners and educators actually face, and to let their feedback beat your assumptions.
• Systems thinking: a knack for seeing how technologies, products, and ecosystems interconnect.
• Rigour: disciplined tracking, documentation, and communication of the innovation process. Fast does not mean sloppy.
• Curiosity and passion for learning: you tinker, you read, you build things nobody asked for, and education is a domain you actually care about.

What seniority looks like here

We are open to a range of experience levels, and we will shape the level of the role around the person. As a guide:

• Earlier in your career, you'll own well-scoped experiments end to end: building functional prototypes, running usability tests, and presenting findings to the team and stakeholders.
• With more experience, you'll lead multi-technology prototypes at higher maturity, drive experiments from hypothesis through validated outcome, mentor other engineers, and influence which ideas the lab pursues.
• At the most senior level, you'll act as a technical advisor across the portfolio: setting engineering standards for applied research, carrying prototypes toward production readiness with product teams, and generating invention disclosures and patents from the work.

If you're unsure whether you're "senior enough", apply anyway. We care more about what you've built and how you think than about years served.

Nice to have

• Experience communicating complex technical ideas to broad audiences, through demos, presentations, writing, or social media.
• Familiarity with design thinking, rapid prototyping, or lean startup methodologies.
• Interest in learning science, neuroscience, or human-computer interaction.
• A network of technologists, designers, and builders, especially in EdTech.
• Patents, publications, hackathon wins, or a portfolio of side projects.

What sets you apart

• You're a hands-on maker who loves to prototype and tinker with new tools.
• You thrive in ambiguity and adapt quickly as priorities shift with the evidence.
• You're as comfortable deep in code as you are demoing your work to customers and senior leaders.

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