AI Engineer

Charity Navigator; Union City (NJ); On-site; USD 105,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Life Insurance

Paid time off 20 days

401(k) matching

FSAs

Job summary

Charity Navigator, the world's largest independent nonprofit evaluator, is hiring a software engineer to ship production LLM-powered features that improve how donors search, compare, and understand 245,000+ nonprofits. You’ll join an existing team and contribute to AI-enabled capabilities from day one.

You will collaborate with senior engineers on system design, focus on reliability, and explore orchestration frameworks and vector stores to surface accurate ratings data while citing sources.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in CS/engineering/AI.
• 2–3+ years building ML models or AI-driven apps with Python.
• Experience with foundation models, prompt engineering, and orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with vector databases and RAG workflows for data retrieval.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship production LLM-powered features with prompt orchestration and tool calling.
• Develop API integrations and RAG workflows connecting data systems to vector search.
• Create evaluation infrastructure to catch regressions in AI features.
• Monitor production AI metrics: accuracy, latency, token cost, and hallucinations.
• Implement runtime safety guardrails within quality and compliance bounds.
• Evaluate models/tools and guide architecture decisions with leadership.
• Collaborate with non-technical stakeholders to scope AI initiatives.

Skills

Python programming

ML fundamentals

LLM & agentic systems

API integration

orchestration frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering/AI or related field

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

pgvector

OpenSearch

MCP servers

Job description

About Us

Charity Navigator is the world's largest and most-utilized independent nonprofit evaluator. The organization guides informed giving by evaluating the financial health, accountability, transparency, and impact of charities and provides data on over 245,000 nonprofits. As a 501(c)(3) public charity itself, Charity Navigator depends on support from individuals, corporations, and foundations to provide this trusted data free of charge to the public.

The Role

You will build and ship production LLM-powered and agentic features that make 2.4 million nonprofit profiles easier to search, compare, and understand - so a donor gets a clear answer instead of a spreadsheet.

This is application-layer work. You will partner with our existing engineering team rather than owning the pipelines yourself, so your time goes into the AI features people use.

You will report to the VP of Engineering and work closely with them and other senior engineers on system design, technical direction, and strategic AI opportunities. You will own AI features from day one, with regular design review and hands‑on guidance on the harder architectural calls, and take on more architectural ownership as you build depth in production AI systems.

What You'll Do

• Build and ship production LLM-powered and agentic features - prompt orchestration, tool calling, embeddings, structured outputs - favoring reusable components over one-off solutions.
• Build API Integrations, MCP servers, and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) workflows that connect our existing data systems to vector search, so that AI features surface and explain our published ratings data accurately and cite the source of each figure.
• Build and run evaluation infrastructure - prompt regression tests, LLM-as-a-judge evaluations, synthetic datasets - that catch feature quality regressions before users do.
• Monitor AI features in production. Track accuracy, latency, token cost, and hallucination rates, then debug and tune prompts based on what you find.
• Implement runtime safety and reliability guardrails that keep AI outputs within quality, compliance, and operational bounds.
• Research and recommend orchestration frameworks, vector stores, and model providers, weighing cost and operational burden against speed. Final build-versus-buy calls are made jointly with the VP of Engineering.
• Work directly with non-technical stakeholders to scope problems and give them honest assessments of what AI can and cannot do.
• Evaluate emerging models and tools, use AI-assisted development extensively, and help raise team engineering standards through code review.
• What We Look For

Experience

• 2-3+ years building or deploying machine learning models or AI-driven applications.
• Education
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or a related field, or a relevant certificate program. Demonstrated technical proficiency and relevant industry experience will be considered in lieu of a formal degree.
• Required
• Python and ML fundamentals. 2+ years of Python, professional or substantial project-based experience, with a solid grasp of core machine learning concepts and API integration.
• LLM and agentic systems. Hands‑on experience with foundation model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, and similar), prompt engineering, and agentic patterns - using orchestration frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex, or integration standards such as the Model Context Protocol.
• Retrieval and data integration. Practical experience querying and tuning a vector database (pgvector, OpenSearch, or similar) for RAG applications.

Nice to Have

• Managed cloud AI services, such as Amazon Bedrock, are preferred.
• Cloud deployment of application code via serverless or containerized patterns, AWS required.
• Scrum or other Agile development experience.
• Cloud, Gen AI, or machine learning certifications, such as AWS Certified Generative AI Developer, Certified Machine Learning, or Solutions Architect.

How You Work

• Resourcefulness and adaptability. You learn quickly against unfamiliar problems, new ideas, and changing technology, and you find a way through when the obvious path is blocked.
• Accountability and trust. Direct, truthful communication. You keep your commitments, admit mistakes and correct them, and give peers respectful, open‑minded feedback.
• Comfort with ambiguity. When requirements are incomplete or still moving, you surface the open questions early and bring options rather than assumptions.
• Translation. You can explain what AI can and cannot do to people who do not build it, and turn their problems into a technical scope, in both directions.
• Coachability. You seek feedback and apply it quickly. You treat design and code review as a learning loop rather than a checkpoint to clear, and you are comfortable saying “I don't know yet” and going to find out.

Location & Work Environment

This position is fully remote within the United States, requiring a quiet, professional home setup for video collaboration. Computer provided. Occasional travel to team retreats or key strategic meetings may be required.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary Range: Our expected hiring range for this role is $105,000 – $125,000, with actual placement depending on experience, skill alignment, and qualifications. Because this is a new role for our team, we remain flexible for exceptional candidates whose background exceeds our core requirements.

Standard Benefits Package:

• Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance (including coverage for dependents)
• Life & Disability Insurance
• 20 vacation days, 10 sick days, 11 paid holidays in your first year
• Retirement savings with up to 3% match of base salary
• Flexible spending and dependent care accounts

Equal Opportunity Employer: Charity Navigator provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment regardless of their race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender, disability, genetics, or any other characteristics protected by federal, state, or local law.

Work Authorization: Only candidates who are legally authorized to work in the United States (and currently residing in the US) should apply.