Founding AI Engineer for Government Tech & Agents

Locke (YC S26); Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

PTO

Job summary

Locke (YC S26) is hiring Members of Technical Staff to build AI agents at the core of our platform. You will work closely with founders, government officials, and users, owning projects from prototype to production.

You will ship end-to-end AI tools, develop retrieval pipelines, and design evaluation frameworks to ensure reliable, high-quality outputs for policy staff and clients. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role in a fast-moving, mission-driven company.

Qualifications

• Solid engineering experience with full-stack product work and applied AI/ML.
• Experience shipping real LLM-powered products and agents.
• Comfort with modern AI stack: agent workflows, retrieval, and evals.

Responsibilities

• Build and own AI agents end-to-end from prototype to production.
• Ship tools for policy staff to use, increasing speed and sharpness.
• Develop retrieval/data pipelines feeding agents with legislative/regulatory information.
• Design eval frameworks to measure and improve output quality.
• Collaborate closely with non-technical teams to ensure usable tools.
• Contribute to building the technical playbook as the company grows.

Skills

Full-stack development

Applied AI/ML

LLM-powered products

Agent workflows

Retrieval pipelines

Eval frameworks

Team collaboration

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

Locke (YC S26) is hiring Members of Technical Staff to build AI agents at the core of our platform. You will work closely with founders, government officials, and users, owning projects from prototype to production.

You will ship end-to-end AI tools, develop retrieval pipelines, and design evaluation frameworks to ensure reliable, high-quality outputs for policy staff and clients. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role in a fast-moving, mission-driven company.