Software Engineer II - AI

Role overview

Software Engineer II — AI on McGraw Hill’s AI Platform team. You will build production software services and APIs that deliver applied AI experiences for students and educators, including RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration, and agentic workflows.

Note: This is a software engineering role, not a data science/ML engineering role. You will not train or fine-tune models or run ML experiments.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-facing services and APIs for student/teacher experiences (RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration, retrieval and routing layers).
• Integrate with model providers (e.g., Azure OpenAI and others).
• Convert applied research outputs and model APIs into reliable, observable, scalable production systems.
• Work across the backend stack; primarily develop in Python.
• Implement retrieval/routing logic and production “glue” to ship AI capabilities.
• Operate and maintain services handling real-world issues (latency, hallucinations, retrieval misses, long-tail inputs).
• Write tested, readable code and participate in code reviews to maintain quality, observability, and reliability.

Requirements

• 2+ years of professional experience building and shipping real software.
• Strong software engineering skills with experience delivering production features.
• Excitement to work on AI-powered products beyond tutorials/side projects.

Nice-to-haves / role context

• Experience with production AI systems and understanding of LLM tradeoffs (via collaboration with senior engineers).
• Backend experience involving Python, async services, and API development.

Tech focus (from the posting)

• Python with FastAPI, async/await, and Pydantic.
• PostgreSQL and async task workers.
• Possible growth into Go services.