Senior AI/ML Engineer

SimpliGov LLC; Baltimore (MD); On-site; USD 185,000 - 215,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401k plan with 4% employer match

Monthly stipends for wellness and home

11 Paid holidays

Flexible time off

Job summary

SimpliGov LLC is seeking an experienced software engineer to design, build, and ship AI features across the SimpliAI suite for state and local government customers. You will own complex AI systems, ensure safety and performance, and navigate regulated environments with a strong emphasis on transparent design and verifiable code.

The role requires 5+ years of software engineering with production ownership, including 2+ years shipping LLM/ML-backed features.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with production ownership.
• 2+ years shipping LLM or ML-backed features to real users.
• Hands-on depth with modern LLM stacks: agentic patterns, RAG, tool use and function calling, structured outputs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship production AI features across the SimpliAI suite: agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, and form and workflow intelligence
• Build evaluation before features: golden datasets, calibrated LLM-as-judge scoring, and regression evals wired into our observability stack; "it demos well" is not a bar we recognize
• Own the quality, safety, latency, and cost of what you ship, including per-workload model routing and unit economics
• Operate inside our compliance boundary: self-hosted observability, GovCloud inference paths (including Amazon Bedrock), and disciplined data retention
• Work in the open through our Plan-and-Review cadence: written designs, explicit assumptions, uncertainty surfaced early
• Raise the AI floor of the whole team: reusable patterns, reviews, and shared components, not private magic

Skills

Software engineering

Production ownership

LLM/ML features

Evaluation discipline

Backend engineering

Job description

Role Overview

SimpliAI is our AI product suite (Ask, Forms, Chat, and Build) moving from private preview toward general availability for state and local government customers. You will design, build, and ship the AI systems behind it: agentic workflows, retrieval, evaluation, model routing, and the guardrails that make AI trustworthy enough for government.

We are explicit about what we are hiring for. AI capability is table stakes here; we will verify it, not celebrate it. What we actually screen for is engineering judgment: the ability to take an ambiguous problem, make defensible design decisions, and hand back work you would stake your name on. Our non-negotiable standard is that you own and can explain every line you ship, no matter what tool produced it.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship production AI features across the SimpliAI suite: agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, and form and workflow intelligence
• Build evaluation before features: golden datasets, calibrated LLM-as-judge scoring, and regression evals wired into our observability stack; "it demos well" is not a bar we recognize
• Own the quality, safety, latency, and cost of what you ship, including per-workload model routing and unit economics
• Operate inside our compliance boundary: self-hosted observability, GovCloud inference paths (including Amazon Bedrock), and disciplined data retention
• Work in the open through our Plan-and-Review cadence: written designs, explicit assumptions, uncertainty surfaced early
• Raise the AI floor of the whole team: reusable patterns, reviews, and shared components, not private magic

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with production ownership, including 2+ years shipping LLM or ML-backed features to real users
• Demonstrated evaluation discipline: you can show how you measured a system, not just that you built it
• Hands-on depth with modern LLM stacks: agentic patterns, RAG, tool use and function calling, structured outputs, prompt and context engineering
• Solid backend engineering fundamentals: APIs, data pipelines, observability; you are an engineer first
• Experience in government, healthcare, or other regulated environments is a plus

Key Competencies

• Judgment under ambiguity: given an underspecified problem, you decompose it, state your assumptions, and choose defensible trade-offs
• Explainability: pick any system you shipped and you can go three levels deep; "the model handles it" is not an answer
• Ownership through production pain: you stayed with systems after launch, and you can talk honestly about what broke
• Cost and safety literacy: you treat unit economics and failure modes as design inputs, not afterthoughts

What This Role Is NOT

This is not a research role and not a demo role. If your portfolio is impressive prototypes that someone else had to productionize, this is not the fit. If you cannot explain and defend the code you commit, regardless of which tool wrote it, this is not the fit.

How We Work

We run an AI-native product development lifecycle. Autonomous agents participate in planning, coding, validation, and release; humans own judgment, standards, and direction. Work moves through a Plan-and-Review cadence rather than ceremony-heavy Agile. Two standards are non-negotiable: you own and can explain everything you ship, no matter what produced it, and you think in the open, surfacing uncertainty early rather than burying it.

What We Offer

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans, with significant employer contributions for employees AND dependents (contributions based on base-level plan; buyup plans available at additional costs)
• Company-sponsored life, short-term, and long-term disability insurance
• 11 Paid holidays
• Flexible time off
• 401k plan with 4% employer match
• Monthly stipends for wellness and home office expenses

Legal Disclaimers

SimpliGovdoes not sponsor applicants for work visas.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is approximately $185,000.00 - $215,000.00+ bonus + benefits. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

SimpliGovparticipates in the federal government's E-Verify program, which confirms employment authorization of all newly hired employees and most existing employees through an electronic databasemaintainedby the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. For new hires, the E-Verify process is completed in conjunction with the Form I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification on or before the first day of work. E-Verify is not used as a tooltopre-screen candidates.