Senior Applied AI Engineer: End-to-End AI in Production

Groundswell; New Mexico; On-site; USD 151,000 - 204,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401K Match

Paid Time Off

Medical benefits

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions. This client-facing, hands-on role spans discovery to production, involving stakeholders, design, build, demonstration, and ongoing accountability.

You will operate across the full lifecycle, balancing AI capabilities with engineering rigor and clear communication. The role requires deep experience with building production software, integrating large language models, and evaluating AI systems.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years building apps that integrate large language models (prompting, retrieval augmented generation, extraction, tool use, agent patterns).
• Experience evaluating AI system quality with metrics, tests, and deployment decisions.
• Proficient in Python/TypeScript/SQL; API integration; handling imperfect data across full app lifecycle.
• Experience leading requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders and translating need into approach.
• Ability to explain tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication for client-facing docs and design rationale.
• Ability to work autonomously in ambiguous situations, surfacing problems worth solving and driving to decisions.
• Track record of improving engineers’ capabilities; U.S. Citizenship required; ability to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand workflow and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building (accuracy targets, human review thresholds, acceptance conditions).
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution suffices (rules, processes, interfaces).
• Select the AI pattern best suited to the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agentic workflow).
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where workloads run (quality, cost, latency, security, authorization).
• Build the complete capability (prompt design, retrieval design, outputs, APIs, data handling, UI).
• Create evaluation sets from real data and iterate based on results.
• Decide when a capability is production-ready; terminate when not.
• Operationalize capabilities with governance, logging, traceability in client environments.
• Produce documentation detailing solution, limitations, validation, and handling incorrect results.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, drift; optimize as better options emerge.
• Lead vision-setting for client engagements with working proofs, not just presentations.
• Mentor engineers; raise the team's technical judgment and output.
• Share reusable patterns with the team to avoid starting from scratch.

Skills

Production software

LLM integration

AI evaluation

Python/TypeScript/SQL

Stakeholder engagement

Tradeoff reasoning

Written communication

Autonomy

Mentoring

Education

Master's degree in relevant field

Tools

Appian

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions. This client-facing, hands-on role spans discovery to production, involving stakeholders, design, build, demonstration, and ongoing accountability.

You will operate across the full lifecycle, balancing AI capabilities with engineering rigor and clear communication. The role requires deep experience with building production software, integrating large language models, and evaluating AI systems.