Founding AI Engineer

TheDriveGroup; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

TheDriveGroup in Arlington, VA is hiring the first dedicated US AI Engineering hire to work directly with the Co-Founder and senior Product leadership, shaping the direction of the company’s AI capability as the US team grows.

You will design, build and productionize Generative AI and agentic AI features, integrate them into the existing platform, and help establish a US-based team of about five engineers, with on-site work strongly preferred.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software/AI engineering roles.
• Experience deploying AI/ML in production.
• Hands-on with Generative AI or agentic AI.
• Experience integrating AI into software products.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and productionise AI systems, GenAI and agentic AI capabilities
• Develop LLM-powered features and AI agents that solve complex, real-world intelligence problems
• Integrate new AI capabilities into an established enterprise software platform
• Take ideas from early prototype through to scalable, reliable production systems
• Work across AI architecture, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring and performance
• Build and deploy cloud-based AI services across AWS/GCP environments
• Work with large volumes of complex structured and unstructured information
• Partner closely with Product, Software Engineering and Data Science teams
• Work directly with the Co-Founder and Head of Product on the direction of the AI capability
• Help establish the foundations for a US AI Engineering team expected to grow to around five people

Skills

Software Engineering

AI Engineering

Machine Learning

Production Systems

Generative AI

Autonomy

Tools

AWS

GCP

LLMs

NLP frameworks

Job description

We're partnering with a high-growth software company building advanced open-source intelligence technology for complex, real-world intelligence environments.

They're making their first dedicated AI Engineering hire in the US - a key appointment that will work directly with the Co-Founder and senior Product leadership, with significant scope to influence the direction of their AI capability as the US engineering team grows.

This isn't a role focused on experimentation or building another AI proof of concept.

You'll be building production AI systems, Generative AI and agentic capabilities directly into an established software platform, solving complex problems across large volumes of structured and unstructured information.

Important - US citizenship is required for this position

Location: Arlington, VA

On-Site is a strong preference

What You'll Do

• Design, build and productionise AI systems, GenAI and agentic AI capabilities
• Develop LLM-powered features and AI agents that solve complex, real-world intelligence problems
• Integrate new AI capabilities into an established enterprise software platform
• Take ideas from early prototype through to scalable, reliable production systems
• Work across AI architecture, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring and performance
• Build and deploy cloud-based AI services across AWS/GCP environments
• Work with large volumes of complex structured and unstructured information
• Partner closely with Product, Software Engineering and Data Science teams
• Work directly with the Co-Founder and Head of Product on the direction of the AI capability
• Help establish the foundations for a US AI Engineering team expected to grow to around five people

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years' experience across Software Engineering, AI Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production applications or systems
• Commercial experience building and deploying AI/ML systems into production
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, Generative AI and/or agentic AI
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into broader software products and platforms
• Cloud engineering experience across AWS, GCP or similar
• Understanding of AI evaluation, monitoring, reliability, scalability and performance
• Experience with modern AI frameworks, APIs and tooling
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work autonomously in an evolving environment
• Experience with Java/Spring, NLP, RAG, information retrieval or large-scale data platforms would be highly regarded

This is a chance to get in at the beginning of a company's US AI Engineering capability, while still having the backing, product and customers of an established international software business.

You'll work directly with senior leadership, have genuine influence over technical direction and help shape the engineering capability as the US team expands.

Most importantly, you'll be working on AI systems that actually make it into production - tackling difficult engineering problems across GenAI, agents, large-scale information processing and intelligence software.