Applied AI Engineer — Client‑Facing, Production AI Systems

Groundswell; Alabama; On-site; USD 88,000 - 172,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Flexible Spending Account

401K match

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement

Certification programs

Professional development

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym

Childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can take a technical approach to undefined business needs and produce working software. This hands-on, client-facing role involves refining requirements with business stakeholders and delivering usable AI-enabled solutions.

You will work across client delivery and internal product work, building production-quality applications, proposing better approaches, and documenting behavior, edge cases, and data handling for repeatable success.

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 a general-purpose language such as Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with experience integrating APIs and working with imperfect data.
• Ability to conduct a requirements conversation with a non-technical stakeholder, identify the underlying need, and return with a proposed approach.
• Willingness to question a design, including one you have been given, and to make the case for an alternative.
• Ability to work through ambiguous requirements with guidance, ask thoughtful questions, and drive assigned work to completion.
• Clear written and verbal communication. This role produces documentation and materials that clients read.
• Candor about the limits of your knowledge and a willingness to ask rather than assume.
• U.S. Citizenship required. Ability to obtain and maintain any federal government background investigation, suitability determination, or security clearance required by assigned client engagements.

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 and alternative approaches during solution design, including identifying opportunities to simplify the solution or reduce the AI component where appropriate.
• Contribute to building complete applications that integrate AI capabilities with prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, tool and function definitions, API integration, data handling, error handling, and user-facing functionality.
• Build evaluation sets from real data, measure results against them, and report findings accurately, including results that do not support the chosen approach.
• Investigate failures by identifying where a capability produced an incorrect result, characterizing the cause, and implementing a fix.
• Support client demonstrations and proof-of-conceptions to help customers understand how AI can be applied to their business challenges.
• Seek feedback, ask thoughtful questions, and continuously build your understanding of client needs and AI best practices.
• Instrument and document your work, including logging, traceability, intended behavior, known limitations, validation method, and failure handling.
• Move between client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement as the work requires.
• Raise blockers, unclear requirements, and results you do not trust early rather than working around them.
• Contribute reusable patterns, prompts, and evaluation harnesses back to the team.

Skills

LLM integration

Prompt engineering

Retrieval-augmented generation

Structured extraction

API integration

Data handling

User-facing functionality

Requirements conversations

Ambiguity handling

Communication

U.S. Citizenship

Willingness to challenge designs

Observability tooling familiarity

Public sector / regulated delivery

Cloud AI services familiarity

Personal/open source language-models

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical field

Tools

APIs

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can take a technical approach to undefined business needs and produce working software. This hands-on, client-facing role involves refining requirements with business stakeholders and delivering usable AI-enabled solutions.

You will work across client delivery and internal product work, building production-quality applications, proposing better approaches, and documenting behavior, edge cases, and data handling for repeatable success.