Senior AI Engineer - Production ML for Federal Clients

Groundswell; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 150,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision plans

Flexible Spending Account

401K Match

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym

Childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is a premier technology integrator solving complex challenges for federal agencies. We seek an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, from discovery through production.

You will work with stakeholders to assess AI applicability, design approaches, build capabilities, and ensure operational readiness across the full lifecycle. You will balance modern AI capabilities with engineering rigor, communicate clearly with engineers and executives, and

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years hands-on experience building applications that integrate large language models (prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, tool use, agent patterns).
• Experience evaluating AI system quality: building test sets, defining metrics, deployment decisions based on evidence.
• Strong programming ability in Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with API integration and handling imperfect data.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders and translate to technical approach.
• Sound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity, with ability to explain to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication for client-facing documentation and design rationale.
• Ability to work autonomously in ambiguous situations and drive decisions.
• US Citizenship required and ability to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow, decision, and acceptance criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building.
• Advise when AI is not the right solution; advocate for simpler approaches when appropriate.
• Select the AI pattern suitable for the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agentic workflow).
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where a workload runs (quality, cost, latency, security, authorization).
• Build complete capability (prompting, retrieval design, outputs, API integration, data handling, error states, UI).
• Develop evaluation sets from real data and measure against them; iterate on results.
• Determine readiness for deployment and productionization; govern operational requirements.

Skills

Production software

Prompt engineering

Retrieval augmentation

Structured extraction

Tool usage

Agent patterns

AI evaluation

Metrics

Test sets

Python

TypeScript

SQL

Requirements gathering

Tradeoffs

Written communication

Autonomy

US Citizenship

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Appian

OutSystems

Mendix

Power Platform

ServiceNow

Salesforce

Job description

Groundswell is a premier technology integrator solving complex challenges for federal agencies. We seek an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, from discovery through production.

You will work with stakeholders to assess AI applicability, design approaches, build capabilities, and ensure operational readiness across the full lifecycle. You will balance modern AI capabilities with engineering rigor, communicate clearly with engineers and executives, and