Senior Applied AI Engineer — Production-Ready & Client-Facing

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

4% 401K Match (immediate vesting)

Paid Time Off

Tuition reimbursement and professional

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym

Job summary

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to turn complex business problems into production AI solutions. You will work with stakeholders to determine feasibility, design the approach, build and deploy in production, and own the outcome across discovery to operations.

You will lead architecture decisions, build end-to-end capabilities (prompts, retrieval, APIs, UI), and mentor engineers while delivering client-facing documentation and design rationale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years hands-on with LLM-based apps, prompt engineering and retrieval.
• Experience evaluating AI system quality with metrics and tests.
• Strong programming in Python, TypeScript or SQL with API integration.
• Ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders.
• Judgment on accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity; able to explain tradeoffs.
• Excellent written communication for client-facing docs and design rationale.
• Ability to work with minimal direction in ambiguous situations and drive to a decision.
• Proven track record mentoring engineers; U.S. Citizenship required and able to obtain clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with stakeholders to understand workflow and success criteria.
• Define measurable success criteria before building the solution.
• Recommend non-AI options when appropriate; suggest improved interfaces or processes.
• Choose AI pattern (extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or agent) suited to the problem.
• Make and defend architecture decisions for where workloads run.
• Build complete capability: prompts, retrieval design, APIs, data handling, UI.
• Create evaluation sets and iteratively improve based on results.
• Assess readiness for deployment and govern production use.
• Document solution scope, limitations, validation, and failure handling.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift post-launch; optimize continuously.
• Lead customer-facing conversations and shape project roadmap with working proofs.
• Mentor junior engineers and share reusable patterns with the team.
• Balance client delivery, internal product work, and rapid PoCs as needed.

Skills

LLM integration

Python

TypeScript

SQL

Requirements gathering

System architecture

Documentation

Tradeoff analysis

Mentorship

AI evaluation

Education

Master's degree in a relevant field

Tools

AWS Bedrock

Azure OpenAI

API integration

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Prompt engineering

Job description

Groundswell is seeking an experienced AI Engineer to turn complex business problems into production AI solutions. You will work with stakeholders to determine feasibility, design the approach, build and deploy in production, and own the outcome across discovery to operations.

You will lead architecture decisions, build end-to-end capabilities (prompts, retrieval, APIs, UI), and mentor engineers while delivering client-facing documentation and design rationale.