Senior Applied AI Engineer - Production AI for Government

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision plans

401K match

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Flexible schedule

On-site gym

Childcare option

Flexible Spending Account

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI-focused software engineer to translate complex business problems into production-ready AI solutions. You will work with clients and internal teams to design, build, and assess AI capabilities, ensuring responsible deployment and measurable outcomes.

You will define success metrics, select AI patterns, and drive end-to-end implementation from discovery through production.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years hands-on experience building apps that integrate large language models (prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, tool use, agent patterns).
• Experience evaluating AI system quality with metrics, test sets, and deployment decisions.
• Strong programming ability in Python, TypeScript, or SQL with API integration and working with imperfect data across full applications.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders and translate to technical approach.
• Ability to explain tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication; produces client-facing documentation and design rationale.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguous situations and drive decisions.
• Track record of improving engineers’ capabilities; U.S. Citizenship required.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand workflow, decision, and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets and acceptance conditions.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution suffices; identify better interfaces or process changes.
• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agentic workflow).
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where workloads run considering quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization.
• Build the complete capability: prompts, retrieval design, APIs, data handling, UI, and governance.
• Create evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating on results.
• Determine readiness for deployment and production readiness.
• Operationalize capabilities with governance, logging, and traceability.
• Produce documentation on solution, validation, limitations, and failure modes.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, drift post-launch and optimize.

Skills

Production software

LLM integration

Metrics & evaluation

Programming: Python/TypeScript/SQL

Requirements gathering

Tradeoff judgment

Written communication

Ambiguity handling

Mentoring engineers

Education

Master's degree in Data Science/CS/Maths

Tools

APIs

LLM services

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI-focused software engineer to translate complex business problems into production-ready AI solutions. You will work with clients and internal teams to design, build, and assess AI capabilities, ensuring responsible deployment and measurable outcomes.

You will define success metrics, select AI patterns, and drive end-to-end implementation from discovery through production.