Senior Applied AI Engineer — Build Production AI for Government

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

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

FSA

401K match

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Flexible schedule

On-site gym

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI engineer who can translate ambiguous business problems into practical AI solutions. This client‑facing, hands‑on role requires designing the approach, building the system, and ensuring production readiness while balancing practicality and impact.

You will work across discovery, build, and operations, engaging with engineers, executives, and end users to shape and deliver outcomes that matter.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• At least 2 years of hands‑on experience building applications that integrate large language models, including prompt engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation, structured extraction, tool use, and agent patterns.
• Demonstrated experience evaluating AI system quality, including building test sets, defining metrics, and making deployment decisions based on evidence.
• Strong programming ability in a general‑purpose language such as Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with experience integrating APIs and working with imperfect data, applied across the full application rather than the AI layer alone.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non‑technical stakeholders and translate what you hear into a technical approach.
• Sound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity, with the ability to explain those tradeoffs to both engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication. This role produces client‑facing documentation and design rationale.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguous situations, surfacing problems worth solving before they are assigned, proposing an approach, and driving it to a decision.
• A track record of improving the capability of other engineers, with or without a formal leadership title. U.S Citizenship required. Ability to obtain and maintain any federal government background investigation, suitability determination, or security clearance required by assigned client engagements.

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. Rules, process changes, and improved interfaces are often the correct answer, and identifying that early is part of the job.
• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem, such as extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or an agentic workflow, rather than defaulting to the most sophisticated option available.
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, weighing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization constraints.
• Build the complete capability rather than the AI components alone. This includes prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, tool and function definitions, API integration, data handling, error states, and the user interface. Adoption usually depends on these supporting elements as much as on model performance.
• Build evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results rather than intuition.
• Determine when a capability is ready for deployment, and identify when it is not.
• Operationalize capabilities in the client environment, including governance, logging, and traceability requirements.
• Produce clear documentation covering what the solution does, its known limitations, how it was validated, and what happens when it produces an incorrect result.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift after launch, and optimize as better or less expensive options become available.
• Set the direction clients cannot yet articulate. Show them what is possible, shape the roadmap, and support the case with working proof rather than presentation material.
• Raise the technical level of the people around you by mentoring engineers newer to AI, reviewing their work, and building the team's judgment as well as its output.
• Contribute reusable patterns back to the team so that each project does not start from scratch.
• Move between client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement as the work requires.

Skills

LLM integration

Prompt engineering

Retrieval augmented generation

APIs integration

Stakeholder communication

Decision making

Education

Master's degree

Tools

Python

TypeScript

SQL

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI engineer who can translate ambiguous business problems into practical AI solutions. This client‑facing, hands‑on role requires designing the approach, building the system, and ensuring production readiness while balancing practicality and impact.

You will work across discovery, build, and operations, engaging with engineers, executives, and end users to shape and deliver outcomes that matter.