Senior Applied AI Engineer - Client-Facing Production

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision plans

Flexible Spending Account

401K match (4%, immediate vesting)

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement and professional

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym and childcare

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an AI engineer to translate complex business problems into production AI solutions. You will work with stakeholders to assess workflows, determine if AI adds value, design the approach, build, demonstrate, and own deployment.

This role spans client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and enablement. You will operate at the intersection of modern AI capabilities, engineering rigor, and effective communication with engineers, executives, and end users.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years hands-on experience building apps with large language models, incl. prompt engineering, RAG, structured extraction, and tool use.
• Experience evaluating AI system quality with metrics and deployment decisions.
• Strong programming ability in Python/TypeScript/SQL with API integrations and data handling.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to explain tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity to engineers and execs.
• Excellent written communication for client-facing docs and design rationale.
• Ability to work autonomously in ambiguous situations and drive decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business/technical stakeholders to understand workflow and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria including accuracy targets, thresholds, and failure definitions.
• Recommend against AI when simpler solutions suffice.
• Select AI pattern appropriate to the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, agent).
• Decide workload placement considering quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization.
• Build complete capability: prompts, retrieval design, tool definitions, API integration, data handling, UI.
• Develop evaluation sets and iterate based on results.
• Determine deployment readiness and operationalize in client environments.
• Produce documentation covering solution limits, validation, and failure handling.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, drift; optimize as needed.
• Shape roadmap and communicate what's possible with working proofs.
• Mentor engineers to raise the team's capability.
• Share reusable patterns back to the team.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

SQL

API integration

Prompt engineering

Retrieval augmentation

Structured extraction

Agent patterns

Leadership

Education

Master's degree in Data Science / CS

Bachelor's degree in a STEM field

Tools

AWS Bedrock

Azure OpenAI

Power Platform

Appian

OutSystems

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an AI engineer to translate complex business problems into production AI solutions. You will work with stakeholders to assess workflows, determine if AI adds value, design the approach, build, demonstrate, and own deployment.

This role spans client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and enablement. You will operate at the intersection of modern AI capabilities, engineering rigor, and effective communication with engineers, executives, and end users.