Applied AI Researcher - Education

Company Description

Rolai is building the Institutional AI Platform for higher education and healthcare. In Higher Ed, we help institutions adopt AI in a secure, practical, and outcomes-driven way so institutions can move from experimentation to real implementation. We work with colleges and universities to support AI adoption across teaching and learning, student support, research, administration, and institutional innovation. Our focus is not just on access to AI, but on helping institutions apply it responsibly, effectively, and at scale. Rolai combines strong product thinking, applied AI, and deep attention to institutional needs such as usability, governance, security, and measurable impact. We are looking for people who want to help shape how AI is actually used throughout education. Role Description This is a full-time remote role for a Applied AI Engineer - Education. In this role, you will design, build, test, and deploy AI-powered products, agents, workflows, and use cases tailored to higher education institutions. You will work at the intersection of applied AI, product engineering, and customer implementation, turning real institutional problems into reliable AI solutions that deliver value for faculty, staff, students, and administrators. You will help build and improve education-focused AI applications across areas such as teaching and learning, course design, assessment, student success, advising, research support, grants, and operational automation. This includes developing prompt systems, retrieval workflows, agent behavior, evaluation frameworks, integrations, and product features that can be used safely and effectively in institutional settings. You will collaborate closely with product, design, customer success, and leadership, as well as directly with university stakeholders, to understand needs, prototype solutions, measure outcomes, and ship production-ready capabilities. This role is ideal for someone who is highly technical, product-minded, comfortable in ambiguity, and excited by applying AI to meaningful problems in education.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering foundation with hands‑on experience building AI-powered applications in production
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript, with experience developing backend systems, APIs, MCP, and workflow-based applications
• Experience building with LLMs and modern AI tooling, including Context and Prompt Engineering, RAG, evaluations, agentic workflows, tool use, and orchestration frameworks
• Ability to translate messy real‑world workflows into practical AI product experiences and deployable solutions
• Experience designing and iterating on AI systems using testing, feedback loops, and measurable performance criteria
• Strong understanding of model limitations, hallucination risk, prompt reliability, grounding strategies, and human-in-the-loop design
• Familiarity with structured and unstructured data pipelines, vector databases, document ingestion, and knowledge retrieval systems
• Ability to work cross-functionally with product, design, and customer-facing teams in a fast-moving remote environment
• Strong problem-solving skills, product intuition, and willingness to move between prototyping, engineering, and implementation work
• Interest in higher education and enthusiasm for building AI products that improve institutional outcomes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in edtech, higher education, teaching and learning technology, or student success platforms
• Familiarity with LMS and campus ecosystem integrations such as Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, LTI, SIS, or related systems
• Experience building AI solutions for domains such as curriculum design, assessment, advising, research support, knowledge management, or administrative automation
• Familiarity with FERPA-conscious product design, enterprise security expectations, or governance requirements in institutional environments
• Experience working directly with customers to scope requirements, prototype workflows, and ship applied AI solutions
• Exposure to multi-model AI environments and the tradeoffs across providers and model types
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field. If you haven't graduated yet, still apply, we want to help you develop and grow.

What You’ll Work On

• Build AI agents and workflows for real higher education use cases
• Develop institution-ready prompt systems, retrieval pipelines, and orchestration logic
• Prototype and ship product features that improve AI usability, reliability, and trust
• Partner with universities to understand workflows and translate them into deployed solutions
• Help define evaluation methods for quality, safety, usefulness, and adoption
• Contribute to the core Rolai platform as we expand our AI Workbench, Agents, Flows, Knowledge Base, and education-specific capabilities
• Bring strong engineering judgment to questions of privacy, governance, scalability, and user experience

Why This Role Matters This role is central to Rolai’s mission. You will help define what applied AI looks like in education when it is implemented responsibly, embedded into real workflows, and built for measurable institutional value. You will not just be training models or building demos. You will be helping universities adopt AI in ways that actually work. Apply tot his job Apply To this Job