Job DescriptionPenguin Random House's Data Science team is hiring a Junior AI Engineer to help unlock the potential of AI and emerging technology through practical tools that improve how teams work.
As the world's leading publishing house, Penguin Random House remains at the forefront of digital transformation, using cutting-edge AI and machine learning techniques to shape the future of book discovery, sales, and customer engagement. With a commitment to quality and innovation, we leverage data science to enhance our capabilities across marketing, pricing, forecasting, personalization, and more.
If you love turning innovation into useful, responsible solutions, and have strong Python skills, product sense, and sound judgment, we'd love to hear from you.
Specific responsibilities include:
- Build tools, automations, and applications that support internal business needs across marketing, research, and workflow optimization.
- Design, test, and improve language model based workflows for tasks such as classification, summarization, extraction, generation, and search support.
- Partner with teams across Marketing, Product, Data Science, and the broader business to translate needs into clear, scalable solutions.
- Develop Python-based services, APIs, and internal tools that integrate AI capabilities into day-to-day workflows.
- Evaluate and refine system performance for quality, speed, reliability, and cost.
- Identify edge cases, improve system behavior, and contribute to best practices for applied AI development.
- Stay current on the rapidly evolving AI landscape and help evaluate which tools and approaches are worth adopting.
Qualifications- Must have prior internship experience in software engineering, with hands-on experience building LLM-based or applied AI workflows
- Strong Python skills and a practical approach to building useful, reliable, and responsible solutions
- Familiarity with agentic coding tools like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, etc.
- Ability to understand stakeholder needs and translate them into effective solutions
- Comfort working across a range of projects and solving ambiguous problems
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical partners
Preferred qualifications:
- Familiarity with agentic frameworks like LangGraph/LangChain, Google ADK, OpenAI Agent SDK, etc.
- Familiarity with evaluation techniques and frameworks like MLFlow, Arize, LangSmith, etc.
- Familiarity with front-end prototyping
Additional InformationPlease be advised that candidates selected to advance to the 1st round of interviews will be required to show photo ID on camera, and final interviews for this role will be in person at a Penguin Random House location. The salary range for this position is $110,000 - $135,000. All positions are currently eligible for an annual profit award or bonus, subject to company results. Please apply by 9/1/2026, using our ATS system and include your cover letter that gives us a sense of who you are and why you're right for the position, as well as a resume for consideration. Before applying for any role at Penguin Random House, we recommend you review ourapplicant resources page and ourFAQs page. Penguin Random House job postings include a good faith compensation range for each open position. The salary range listed is specific to each particular open position and takes into account various factors including the specifics of the individual role, and candidate's relevant experience and qualifications.
Full-time employees are eligible for our comprehensive benefits program. Our range of benefits include, but are not limited to, Medical/Prescription drug insurance, Dental, Vision, Health Care/Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, Health Savings Account, Pre-Tax and Roth 401(k), Short and Long-Term Disability Insurance, Life/AD&D Insurance, Commuter Benefits, Student Loan Repayment Program, Educational Assistance & generous paid time off.
