Job Description

Noodle is higher education’s leading strategy, services, and technology partner. We develop infrastructure, provide life-changing learning experiences, and grow the awareness of and the enrollment in some of the best academic institutions in the world. Our vision is “to empower universities to change the world.” We achieve this vision by offering our university partners various products and services that help them be more resilient, responsive, efficient, and interconnected.

We’re looking for a Prompt Systems Engineer to sit at the intersection of AI capability and educational effectiveness. You will own the design, testing, and continuous improvement of the prompts and system instructions that power Noodle’s AI agents across enrollment, learning, and student support use cases.

This is a hands-on, high-impact role. You’ll work directly with product managers, learning designers, university stakeholders, and engineers to translate operational and pedagogical goals and business requirements into agent behavior — and you’ll build the evaluation frameworks to prove that behavior is working.

As a Prompt Systems Engineer, you will:

Prompt Design & Engineering

• Write, iterate, and maintain system prompts and instruction sets for Noodle’s AI agents focused on students enrollment, learning, and retention
• Translate complex educational and operational requirements into clear, reliable agent behavior — including persona definition, tone, scope constraints, fallback handling, and multi-turn conversation logic
• Design prompt architectures for multi-step and chained agent workflows, including RAG-augmented agents that draw from program-specific knowledge bases
• Collaborate with the engineering team to configure and deploy agents through Noodle’s AI orchestration platform, including primary prompts, secondary context, knowledge base attachments, and embed definitions
• Create the learner experiences defined by “three-way” chat between the learner, a campus or Noodle support staff member, and that staff member’s AI assistant

Evaluation & Quality

• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure agent accuracy, tone, hallucination rate, task completion, and alignment with rubric-based learning objectives
• Use Langfuse (Noodle’s LLM observability platform) to monitor prompt performance in production, identify regressions, and prioritize prompt improvements
• Design red-teaming and adversarial testing protocols to surface edge cases and failure modes before agents reach students
• Establish prompt versioning practices and maintain a library of tested, reusable prompt components

Collaboration & Enablement

• Partner with Noodle teammates and university stakeholders to design, build, and test agents — translating learning objectives, operational flows, rubric assessments, and more into prompt-level agent instructions
• Work with enrollment and student success teams to tune companion agents for specific programs and university partner contexts
• Contribute prompt engineering guidelines and best practices documentation for internal teams who configure their own agents on Noodle’s AI orchestration platform
• Stay current with model capability changes across OpenAI, Anthropic, and other providers integrated into Noodle’s stack, and proactively surface opportunities or risks
• Perform other duties as assigned

You have:

• 2+ years of experience designing and iterating on prompts for LLM-powered applications in a production environment
• Deep familiarity with prompt patterns: few-shot examples, chain-of-thought, system vs. user roles, output formatting constraints, tool-use prompting, and RAG integration
• Strong written communication — you can write clearly, precisely, and persuasively, because that’s the core of the job
• Experience building and running prompt evaluations: defining metrics, writing test cases, and interpreting results to make improvement decisions
• Comfort working across disciplines — you can hold a conversation with an engineer about context windows and with a faculty member about Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Experience with LLM observability tools (Langfuse, Weights & Biases, or similar)
• Familiarity with LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) and how AI tools plug into LMS platforms like Moodle, Canvas, or Instructure
• Experience with voice agents or multimodal prompting
• Comfort reading and writing basic code (JavaScript, Python) to support prompt automation and testing pipelines
• Knowledge of OpenAI, Anthropic, or other model provider APIs
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity and iterate quickly based on user feedback
• Ability to work effectively in dynamic, rapidly changing, team-based environment

At Noodle, we hire people who will help us change the future of education. Even if you don't think you check off every bullet point on this list, we still encourage you to apply! We value both current experience and future potential.

Meet the team!

Noodle Africa Benefits

• Work from the comfort of your home office!
• Great compensation package
• Tools you need on us! Laptop (Mac is our computer of choice) and EcoFlow inverter
• 12 weeks paid Parental Leave benefits
• 20 working days annual leave + 10 paid national holidays
• Medical/RA benefit
• Internet benefits
• Full access to our employee assistance program (EAP) through Company Wellness
• Annual education stipend for lifelong learning

Eligibility Requirements:

This position is based in South Africa. Applicants must be legally authorized to live and work in South Africa and must maintain residency within South Africa throughout their employment. Proof of eligibility and residency will be required upon hiring.

At Noodle, we hire people who will help us change the future of online education. Even if you don't think you check off every bullet point on this list, we still encourage you to apply! We value both current experience and future potential.

Noodle is committed to creating a welcoming and inclusive workplace for everyone. We value and celebrate our differences because those differences are what make our team shine. We hire great people from different backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes us stronger as a whole. Women, people of color, LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, and members of other underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to apply. Noodle is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against candidates on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, or veteran status.