Senior Applied AI Engineer - Production-Ready AI Solutions

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

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical, dental, and?视?—

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 production-grade AI solutions. You will work directly with stakeholders to assess workflows, determine if AI adds value, design the approach, build it, and keep it in production with governance and clear documentation.

You will operate across discovery, build, and operations, collaborating with engineers, executives, and end users to deliver measurable results in complex, client-facing projects.

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.
• Proven ability to lead requirements conversations with non‑technical stakeholders and translate what you hear into a technical approach.
• Sound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity, with the ability to explain those tradeoffs to engineers and executives.
• Excellent written communication. This role produces client‑facing documentation and design rationale.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguous situations, surfacing problems worth solving and driving them to a decision.
• A track record of improving the capability of other engineers, with or without a formal leadership title. U.S Citizenship required and ability to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow, the decision being supported, and acceptance criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets, human review thresholds, and acceptance conditions.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution is the right one.
• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem, such as extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or an agentic workflow.
• Make and defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, weighing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization constraints.
• Build the complete capability including prompts, retrieval design, structured outputs, tool definitions, API integration, data handling, error states, and user interface.
• Build evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results.
• Determine when a capability is ready for deployment and monitor after launch with governance and logging.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

SQL

LLM integration

Prompt engineering

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

Structured extraction

APIs

Agent patterns

Data handling

Education

Master's degree in Data Science

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI engineer to turn ambiguous business problems into production-grade AI solutions. You will work directly with stakeholders to assess workflows, determine if AI adds value, design the approach, build it, and keep it in production with governance and clear documentation.

You will operate across discovery, build, and operations, collaborating with engineers, executives, and end users to deliver measurable results in complex, client-facing projects.