Senior Applied AI Engineer: Production AI for Client Projects

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

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vis

Flexible Spending Account

4% 401K Match (immediate vesting)

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement, certification,—

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym and childcare option

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to turn ambiguous business problems into practical AI solutions for federal clients. You will work with stakeholders to define requirements, design approaches, build end-to-end capabilities, and shepherd them into production with governance and measurable success criteria.

You will lead discovery, evaluate AI options, and decide when simpler rules or interfaces are preferable. Strong collaboration with executives and engineers is essential.

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 Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with API integration and working with imperfect data across the full application, not just the AI layer.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders and translate insights into a technical approach.
• Sound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity, with the ability to explain to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication and client-facing documentation.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets and acceptance conditions.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution is appropriate, including process changes and improved interfaces.
• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agentic workflow).
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, weighing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization.
• Build the complete capability including prompt and retrieval design, API integration, data handling, and user interface.
• Create evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results.
• Determine readiness for deployment and maintain governance, logging, and traceability in production.
• Produce clear documentation covering solution scope, limitations, validation, and failure handling.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift after launch and optimize over time.
• Shape the roadmap and prove what is possible with working proofs.
• Mentor engineers, raise the team's judgment, and share reusable patterns.
• Move between client delivery, internal product work, and rapid POCs as needed.

Skills

Production software shipping

LLM integration

Prompt engineering

Retrieval-augmented generation

APIs & data integration

Requirements gathering

Cost/latency tradeoffs

Technical leadership

Clear written communication

Education

Master's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Appian

OutSystems

Mendix

Microsoft Power Platform

ServiceNow

Salesforce

AWS Bedrock

Azure OpenAI

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to turn ambiguous business problems into practical AI solutions for federal clients. You will work with stakeholders to define requirements, design approaches, build end-to-end capabilities, and shepherd them into production with governance and measurable success criteria.

You will lead discovery, evaluate AI options, and decide when simpler rules or interfaces are preferable. Strong collaboration with executives and engineers is essential.