Senior AI Engineer — End-to-End LLM & AI Apps

Steampunk, Inc.; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Steampunk, Inc. seeks a Senior AI Developer to design, build, and optimize AI solutions across predictive, generative, and autonomous domains.

You will work from data to deployment, collaborating with product teams, LLMOps, and mission stakeholders to deliver robust, production-ready capabilities. You will mentor developers, prototype iteratively, and implement scalable inference for enterprise systems, emphasizing safety, privacy, and responsible AI principles.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree and 8+ years of experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering, with 2+ years in AI/ML or LLM-driven development.
• Strong proficiency in Python and AI frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face).
• Production-grade AI applications: APIs, back-end services, orchestration, and front-end integrations.
• Experience with RAG architectures, embeddings, vector stores, and context retrieval.
• Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration, prompt engineering and LLM interaction design.
• Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and security fundamentals for AI workloads.
• CI/CD pipelines and containerization (Docker) for AI systems.
• Experience with structured/unstructured data, document processing, and enterprise integration.
• Understanding of responsible AI principles: safety, fairness, privacy, risk mitigation.
• Strong analytical/communication skills across engineering, design, and mission domains.
• Proven experience mentoring teammates and improving technical bar.

Responsibilities

• Develop end-to-end AI solutions including LLM-powered apps and predictive models.
• Implement reusable AI components, libraries, and APIs to accelerate delivery.
• Integrate AI models with enterprise systems, data platforms, and cloud services.
• Lead iterative experimentation, prototyping, and model improvement with teams.
• Design prompt strategies, context management, and retrieval systems.
• Build scalable inference services and optimize model performance.
• Collaborate with designers/product teams to translate user needs into AI features.
• Implement secure-by-design practices, safety guardrails, and evaluation metrics.
• Contribute to internal AI frameworks and shared accelerators.
• Mentor junior developers and conduct code reviews across teams.
• Stay current with AI techniques, models, and agent frameworks.

Skills

Python

AI/ML development

LLM frameworks

Prompt engineering

Model deployment

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

APIs & backend

Education

Bachelors degree

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Hugging Face Transformers

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Steampunk, Inc. seeks a Senior AI Developer to design, build, and optimize AI solutions across predictive, generative, and autonomous domains.

You will work from data to deployment, collaborating with product teams, LLMOps, and mission stakeholders to deliver robust, production-ready capabilities. You will mentor developers, prototype iteratively, and implement scalable inference for enterprise systems, emphasizing safety, privacy, and responsible AI principles.