Applied AI Engineer — Client‑Facing & AI Delivery

Groundswell; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 88,000 - 172,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401K match

Paid time off

Tuition assistance

Flexible schedule

On-site gym

Childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an engineer to take an incompletely defined business need and turn it into working software. This hands-on, client-facing role will involve refining requirements with stakeholders, proposing better approaches, and delivering production-quality AI-enabled applications.

Expect cross-functional collaboration across client delivery and internal product work, with a focus on practical, measurable outcomes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent demonstrated ability.
• 1+ years of professional software development experience.
• Hands-on experience building applications that integrate large language models, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, and/or tool use.
• Experience contributing to applications that integrate AI capabilities with APIs, data handling, and user-facing functionality.
• Familiarity with Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with API integration and handling imperfect data.
• Ability to conduct a requirements conversation with non-technical stakeholders and propose an approach.
• Willingness to question designs and advocate alternatives.
• Ability to work through ambiguous requirements and drive tasks to completion.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Candor about knowledge limits and willingness to ask questions.

Responsibilities

• Take a defined technical approach and build it into production‑quality functionality.
• Participate in requirements discussions with business stakeholders to understand the workflow, business need, and desired outcome.
• Contribute ideas during solution design, including simplifying the solution or reducing the AI component when appropriate.
• Build complete applications integrating AI capabilities with prompts, retrieval design, structured outputs, tool definitions, API integration, data handling, error handling, and user-facing features.
• Create evaluation sets from real data, measure results, and report findings honestly, even if results disfavor the chosen approach.
• Investigate failures by identifying causes, characterizing them, and implementing fixes.
• Support client demonstrations and proofs-of-concept to illustrate AI applications.
• Ask thoughtful questions and continuously align with client needs and best practices.
• Instrument and document work with logging, traceability, validation, and failure handling.
• Move between client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement as needed.
• Raise blockers and unclear requirements early rather than work around them.
• Share reusable patterns, prompts, and evaluation harnesses with the team.

Skills

LLM integration

Prompt engineering

Requirements gathering

API integration

Data handling

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in technical field

Tools

Python

TypeScript

SQL

APIs

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an engineer to take an incompletely defined business need and turn it into working software. This hands-on, client-facing role will involve refining requirements with stakeholders, proposing better approaches, and delivering production-quality AI-enabled applications.

Expect cross-functional collaboration across client delivery and internal product work, with a focus on practical, measurable outcomes.