Associate Applied AI Engineer

Who Are We? 
Groundswell is a premier technology integrator and solution provider, resolutely committed to solving the most complex challenges facing federal agencies today. Our name, Groundswell, represents our commitment to be an unstoppable, seismic change in government. Ours is a small company culture with big company reach and results.  Are you ready to be audacious, be bold and drive change at a rapid pace?  Join us, where we’ll make a greater impact together.
 

What You'll do:

We are looking for an engineer who can take a technical approach and an incompletely defined business need and produce working software. This role will grow into defining both.

This is a hands-on role, client-facing role. You will work directly with business stakeholders to refine the requirements around a business need and build the result. Proposing a better approach when you see one is expected. Requirements definition becomes your responsibility early, and technical design follows as you develop.

The work spans client delivery, internal product development, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement. Some weeks are spent primarily building functionality and others in front of customers. We are looking for range rather than specialization.

Most customers do not yet have a clear picture of what AI can do for their work. Helping them develop one is part of this role.

Responsibilities

• Take a defined technical approach and build it into production-quality functionality.

• Participate in requirements discussions with business stakeholders to understand the workflow, business need, and desired outcome

• Contribute ideas and alternative approaches during solution design, including identifying opportunities to simplify the solution or reduce the AI component where appropriate.

• Contribute to building complete applications that integrate AI capabilities with prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, tool and function definitions, API integration, data handling, error handling, and user-facing functionality.

• Build evaluation sets from real data, measure results against them, and report findings accurately, including results that do not support the chosen approach.

• Investigate failures by identifying where a capability produced an incorrect result, characterizing the cause, and implementing a fix.

• Support client demonstrations and proof-of-concepts to help customers understand how AI can be applied to their business challenges.

• Seek feedback, ask thoughtful questions, and continuously build your understanding of client needs and AI best practices.

• Instrument and document your work, including logging, traceability, intended behavior, known limitations, validation method, and failure handling.

• Move between client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement as the work requires.

• Raise blockers, unclear requirements, and results you do not trust early rather than working around them.

• Contribute reusable patterns, prompts, and evaluation harnesses back to the team.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field, or equivalent demonstrated ability.
• 1+ years of professional software development experience.

• Hands-on experience building applications that integrate large language models, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, structured extraction, and/or tool use.  Experience may be gained through professional work, internships, academic research, or significant personal/open-source projects.

• Experience contributing to applications that integrate AI capabilities with APIs, data handling, and user-facing functionality

• Familiarity with a general-purpose language such as Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with experience integrating APIs and working with imperfect data.

• Ability to conduct a requirements conversation with a non-technical stakeholder, identify the underlying need, and return with a proposed approach.

• Willingness to question a design, including one you have been given, and to make the case for an alternative.

• Ability to work through ambiguous requirements with guidance, ask thoughtful questions, and drive assigned work to completion.

• Clear written and verbal communication. This role produces documentation and materials that clients read.

• Candor about the limits of your knowledge and a willingness to ask rather than assume.
• U.S. Citizenship required. Ability to obtain and maintain any federal government background investigation, suitability determination, or security clearance required by assigned client engagements.

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Preferred qualifications

• Prior client-facing work in consulting, solutions engineering, professional services, or implementation.

• Experience with a low-code or application platform such as Appian, OutSystems, Mendix, Microsoft Power Platform, ServiceNow, or Salesforce.

• Public sector or regulated-industry delivery experience.

• Experience with cloud AI services such as AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI.

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation or observability tooling.

• Personal or open source projects involving language models, agents, retrieval, or evaluation.

Skills:

Certification:

Why You’ll Never Want to Leave:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans 
• Flexible Spending Account 
• 4% 401K Match (immediate vesting) 
• Paid Time Off 
• Tuition reimbursement, certification programs, and professional development
• Flexible work schedule
• On-site gym and childcare option 

The salary range for this role takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including but not limited to skill sets, experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs. The disclosed range estimate has not been adjusted for any applicable geographic differential associated with the location at which the position may be filled. At Groundswell, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:

$88,177.00 - $171,637.00

NOTE: Groundswell does not accept unsolicited resumes through or from search firms or staffing agencies. All unsolicited resumes will be considered the property of Groundswell, and Groundswell will not be obligated to pay a placement fee.

Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, pregnancy, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected category under applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Read a copy of the Company’s Non-Discrimination Policy Statement.

Additional Resources:

• EO 13496 Notification of Employee Rights under NLRA

• Know your rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal
   

Disability Accessibility Accommodation: If you are an individual with a disability and would like to request a reasonable accommodation as part of the employment selection process, please contact us at [email protected] or 703-639-1777.