Applied AI Engineer — Client‑Facing Prototyping

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

Flexible Spending Account

4% 401K Match (immediate vesting)

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement and professional

development

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym

Childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an engineer to take an analytical approach to undefined business needs and turn them into working software. This hands-on, client-facing role collaborates with business stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver production-ready solutions integrating AI capabilities.

The ideal candidate has 1+ years of software development experience, familiarity with Python/TypeScript/SQL, and a knack for navigating ambiguity.

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 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‑concepts 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

Python

TypeScript

APIs

Prompt engineering

RAG integration

Education

Bachelor's degree

Equivalent ability

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an engineer to take an analytical approach to undefined business needs and turn them into working software. This hands-on, client-facing role collaborates with business stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver production-ready solutions integrating AI capabilities.

The ideal candidate has 1+ years of software development experience, familiarity with Python/TypeScript/SQL, and a knack for navigating ambiguity.