Senior Client-Facing AI Engineer for Federal Production

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Flexible spending account

401K match

Paid time off

Tuition reimbursement

Flexible work schedule

On-site gym / childcare

Job summary

Groundswell seeks an experienced AI Engineer to turn ambiguous business problems into production AI solutions while recognizing when AI is not the right fit. This client‑facing role spans discovery, design, build, and production ownership across delivery, product, and enablement efforts.

You will work with executives, engineers, and end users to shape practical, auditable AI capabilities. Strong communication and architectural judgment are essential, along with citizenship readiness for federal

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and shipping production software.
• 2+ years 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.
• 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.
• U.S. Citizenship required; able to obtain security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow, the decision being supported, and the current standard for acceptable results.
• Define measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets, human review thresholds, acceptance conditions, and failure definitions.
• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution is the right one; identify that early.
• 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, balancing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization constraints.
• Build the complete capability including prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, API integration, data handling, error states, and user interface.
• Develop evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results.
• Operationalize capabilities in the client environment with governance, logging, and traceability.
• Produce clear documentation of what the solution does, limitations, validation, and handling of incorrect results.
• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift after launch and optimize as needed.
• Mentor engineers, share reusable patterns, and move between client delivery, product work, and POC work as needed.

Skills

Software development

LLM integration

Python/TypeScript/SQL

Requirements gathering

Stakeholder communication

Decision making

Written communication

Security clearance readiness

Education

U.S. citizenship

Tools

Cloud AI services (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI)

Job description

Groundswell seeks an experienced AI Engineer to turn ambiguous business problems into production AI solutions while recognizing when AI is not the right fit. This client‑facing role spans discovery, design, build, and production ownership across delivery, product, and enablement efforts.

You will work with executives, engineers, and end users to shape practical, auditable AI capabilities. Strong communication and architectural judgment are essential, along with citizenship readiness for federal