Senior AI Engineer - Production-Ready, Client-Facing Impact

Groundswell; Missouri; On-site; USD 150,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

4% 401K Match (immediate vesting)

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement and professional

Professional development

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym and childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who knows when AI is not the answer. This client‑facing, hands‑on role spans discovery through production, with responsibility for design, build, demonstration and ongoing operation in a real‑world client environment.

You will lead requirements conversations, select appropriate AI patterns, and build end‑to‑end capabilities with attention to quality, cost, latency and security, while

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• At least 2 years hands-on experience building applications that integrate large language models.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating AI system quality with metrics and test sets.
• Strong programming ability in Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with API integration and working with imperfect data.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders.
• Sound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity; able to explain them to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication; this role produces client-facing documentation and design rationale.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguous situations and drive decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow, the decision being supported, and the current standard for acceptable results.
• Define measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets, human review thresholds, acceptance conditions, and the definition of failure.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution is the right one; use rules, process changes, and improved interfaces when appropriate.
• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agentic workflow).
• Defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, balancing quality, cost, latency, and security.
• Build the complete capability (prompts, retrieval design, APIs, data handling, UI) and ensure production readiness.
• Develop evaluation sets from real data and measure against them; iterate based on results.
• Determine readiness for deployment and operationalize capabilities in the client environment.
• Produce clear documentation detailing what the solution does, limitations, validation, and handling of incorrect results.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift post-launch and optimize as needed.

Skills

Years of software delivery experience

LLM integration experience

Programming in Python/TypeScript/SQL

Client communication

Documentation and design rationale

Ambiguity handling and decision making

Mentoring engineers

Education

Master's degree in Data Science or Computer Science

Tools

APIs integration

LLM tooling

Retrieval systems

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who knows when AI is not the answer. This client‑facing, hands‑on role spans discovery through production, with responsibility for design, build, demonstration and ongoing operation in a real‑world client environment.

You will lead requirements conversations, select appropriate AI patterns, and build end‑to‑end capabilities with attention to quality, cost, latency and security, while