Senior Learning Engineer [Math Focus]

ABOUT PLAYLAB

Playlab is a tech non-profit dedicated to helping educators and students become critical consumers and creators of AI.

We believe that an open-source, community-driven approach is key to harnessing the potential of AI in education. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators and students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 40,000 educators have published apps on Playlab, and the impact is growing every day.

At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material, one that should be shaped by many to bring their ideas about learning to life. If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us.

THE ROLE

Playlab seeks a Senior Learning Engineer with deep mathematics expertise to join our growing Learning Engineering team. This role is anchored in K-12 math: building AI tools, coaching math educators, and shaping how AI shows up in math classrooms across our partner schools and districts. If you’re successful, you’ll help grow a rich and diverse community of Dan Meyer like educators: people with deep expertise in mathematics education who are actually creating and using AI tools that reflect their expertise and values.

Math is one of the highest-leverage and most demanding places to put AI to work in K-12. Confident wrong answers can do real harm. Tools that scaffold student thinking, make teacher prep faster, and surface real misconceptions can shift what's possible in a classroom. Playlab's partner network includes a growing concentration of math-focused districts, networks, and curriculum partners, and we want a senior practitioner who can hold the math craft bar across that work.

As Playlab's senior math voice, you will hold trusted relationships with math teachers, coaches, and curriculum leaders, design and build math-specific apps and starter collections, and mentor other Learning Engineers as they take on math-adjacent partner work. You will be the steady technical presence math educators rely on when they want to make AI useful in their work and for their students.

This work spans daily classroom tools (problem generators, scaffolded explanations, error analysis flows, conceptual checks), student-facing builders (apps that let students model, conjecture, and stress-test their thinking), and longer arcs that ask what AI changes about math pedagogy itself. You'll work alongside partner organizations, adapting how you build with each district's curriculum, standards, and goals. You report to the Head of Learning Engineering and partner closely with the Head of K-12 Partnerships, the broader Learning Engineering team, and Playlab's product and engineering teams.

You'll also bring insights from the field back to our product and learning teams, surfacing what math educators need so the platform and our partnerships keep getting sharper.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Identify high leverage opportunities for creating AI apps that enhance math teaching and learning: you’ll do this independently and in deep collaboration with partners – many of whom can from a mix of pedagogical backgrounds. Our partners include Illustrative Mathematics, Learning Commons, Leading Educators, Bank Street, New Visions, and a host of school systems with a mix of approaches, paradigms, and practices for math education.

Build Bespoke Math Apps on Playlab for and with partner organizations, including problem generators, scaffolding and remediation tools, error analysis flows, conceptual checks, and student-facing builders that fit specific curricula and standards. You’ll do this both within Playlab’s existing software and will have the chance to (a) test new features and (b) build beyond Playlab’s software to prototype and make ideas visible. When you’re building within Playlab’s software, the goal is to get to real, workable solutions with partners. When building outside of it (e.g. using AI assisted coding tools), the goal is to prototype what might be possible to shape where our product team goes next.

Co-Design With Math Educators through hands-on coaching, design sprints, and 1:1 build time, helping them move from a real classroom problem to a working AI tool.

Set the Bar for Math AI Tools across the platform, defining what good looks like for math-specific apps and reviewing educator builds with care and craft. This includes contributing to our evaluation, quality control, and benchmarking work, often in deep collaboration with our partners and community. You’ll have the chance to not just contribute to evaluation and quality systems, but to help open source our work to the field and to share what we’re learning at conferences, academic publications, and on our blog.

Mentor LEs on Math-Adjacent Work so the team builds confidence around math content, math standards, and the pedagogical questions AI raises in math classrooms.

Run High-Trust Coaching through drop-in sessions, async build support, and 1:1 video coaching with the most advanced math builders in our partner network.

Push the Boundaries of What's Possible in Math Apps with advanced prompting (multi-step solving, evaluator loops, structured math knowledge sources, agentic problem decomposition).

Support Student-Facing Math Building including hackathons, design challenges, and project-based work where students aged 13+ build AI tools for their own math thinking.

Bring Field Insights Back to Playlab's product, engineering, and research teams so the platform gets sharper for math use cases.

YOU MIGHT BE A FIT IF YOU…

We don’t expect you to have expertise in all of the categories below! We’re building a team that has a mix of deep educational and technical expertise. You might…

- Have 5+ years of K-12 math classroom or instructional leadership experience, with a deep respect for how hard math teaching actually is. The core skill we’re looking for is: deep understanding of math teaching and learning; and experience coaching and supporting math educators in this work

- Have experience using, interrogating, and creating AI tools. If you’re coming from an education background, you have an emerging point of view on shortcomings of existing tools, what you wish existed, and challenges in thoughtfully using AI to meaningfully advance math education. If you’re a technologist, you should be able to speak to the technical challenges doing this work and have ideas on where you’d invest effort to make improvements (LLMs paired with calculators, structured knowledge, where you’d integrate with a Desmos or Wolfram, or thoughts on the kinds of evaluator loops to handle correctness & alignment with a given use case or approach).

- Understand the difference between AI that produces a confident wrong answer and AI that supports real mathematical thinking, and care about that difference.

- Have experience mentoring or coaching math educators or instructional coaches. If you’re a technologist, this ideally means you have experience working alongside educators and instructional leaders first as a learner, and second as a meaningful support to their work.

- Care for equity and access at the center of the work, especially for students who have been systematically underserved by their math experiences.

- Are willing to travel to partner sites for in-person build days, coaching, and design sprints.

BONUS POINTS FOR...

- Background in math curriculum design, assessment design, or learning science focused on math cognition

- Experience with structured math knowledge sources, proof systems, or computer algebra integrations alongside LLMs

- Familiarity with major math curricula (Illustrative Math, Eureka, Open Up, etc.)

- Bilingual (especially Spanish/English)

- A network across math-focused districts, math nonprofits, or math teacher communities

WHY JOIN US?

Real Impact: Shape how AI shows up in math classrooms across the country, in tools that real students and teachers use.

Craft: Hold the bar for math AI work at Playlab and define what good looks like as the field figures this out.

Mission-Aligned Team: Join a small, passionate group committed to equity, creativity, and joyful learning, backed by the Gates Foundation, Google, CZI, and the Schwab Foundation.

Flexible Work: Remote-first with autonomy and a strong culture of collaboration, plus meaningful in-person time with partner communities.

Competitive Pay & Benefits: Includes salary, healthcare, retirement, generous time off, and opportunities for professional growth.