Senior Applied AI Engineer - Production AI, Client-Facing

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision

401K match

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym and childcare

Flexible Spending Account

Job summary

Groundswell is a premier technology integrator solving complex challenges for federal agencies. We seek an engineer who turns ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who knows when AI is not the answer.

This client-facing, hands-on role spans discovery, design, build, and production with end-to-end accountability. You will work across delivery, product development, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement, collaborating with engineers, executives, and end users while

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production software development.
• 2+ years building LLM-integrated apps including prompt engineering and retrieval.
• Experience evaluating AI systems with metrics and test sets.
• Strong programming in Python/TypeScript/SQL and API integration.
• Ability to translate stakeholder needs into technical approach.
• Ability to justify tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency.
• Excellent written communication for client-facing docs.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguity.
• U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with stakeholders to understand workflow and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution exists.
• Select AI pattern appropriate to the problem.
• Make architecture decisions on where workloads run.
• Build complete capability including prompts, retrieval design, API integration.
• Build evaluation sets and iterate against results.
• Determine readiness for deployment.
• Operationalize capabilities with governance and logging.
• Produce documentation on solution and limitations.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, drift after launch.
• Drive roadmap and proof-based demonstrations.
• Mentor engineers and raise team capabilities.
• Contribute reusable patterns.
• Move between client delivery and internal work as needed.

Skills

Software development

LLM integration

AI evaluation

Python/TypeScript/SQL

Requirements leadership

Tradeoff analysis

Technical writing

Independent work

Mentoring

Education

Master's degree (Data Science / CS / Math)

Tools

APIs

Cloud AI services

Job description

Groundswell is a premier technology integrator solving complex challenges for federal agencies. We seek an engineer who turns ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who knows when AI is not the answer.

This client-facing, hands-on role spans discovery, design, build, and production with end-to-end accountability. You will work across delivery, product development, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement, collaborating with engineers, executives, and end users while