Senior 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 turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who recognizes when AI is not the answer.

This is a client-facing, hands-on role. You will work with stakeholders to understand a workflow, determine whether an AI capability will meaningfully improve it, design the approach, build it, demonstrate that it works, and remain accountable for it in production. You will work across the full lifecycle rather than handing off between discovery, build, and operations.

The work spans client delivery, internal product development, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement. You should be comfortable moving between them, and comfortable being the most AI-literate person in a room that includes engineers, executives, and end users.

The role sits at the intersection of three skill sets: understanding what modern AI can and cannot do, the engineering rigor to ship it into production, and the communication skill to run a requirements conversation with someone who has never used the technology.

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 the definition of failure.

• Recommend against AI when a simpler solution is the right one. Rules, process changes, and improved interfaces are often the correct answer, and identifying that early is part of the job.

• Select the AI pattern appropriate to the problem, such as extraction, classification, summarization, retrieval, or an agentic workflow, rather than defaulting to the most sophisticated option available.

• Make and defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, weighing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization constraints.

• Build the complete capability rather than the AI components alone. This includes prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, tool and function definitions, API integration, data handling, error states, and the user interface. Adoption usually depends on these supporting elements as much as on model performance.

• Build evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results rather than intuition.

• Determine when a capability is ready for deployment, and identify when it is not.

• Operationalize capabilities in the client environment, including governance, logging, and traceability requirements.

• Produce clear documentation covering what the solution does, its known limitations, how it was validated, and what happens when it produces an incorrect result.

• Monitor quality, cost, latency, and drift after launch, and optimize as better or less expensive options become available.

• Set the direction clients cannot yet articulate. Show them what is possible, shape the roadmap, and support the case with working proof rather than presentation material.

• Raise the technical level of the people around you by mentoring engineers newer to AI, reviewing their work, and building the team’s judgment as well as its output.

• Contribute reusable patterns back to the team so that each project does not start from scratch.

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

Required 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 a general-purpose language such as Python, TypeScript, or SQL, with experience integrating APIs and working with imperfect data, applied across the full application rather than the AI layer alone.

• 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 both 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 before they are assigned, proposing an approach, and driving it to a decision.

• A track record of improving the capability of other engineers, with or without a formal leadership title.
• U.S Citizenship required. Ability to obtain and maintain any federal government background investigation, suitability determination, or security clearance required by assigned client engagements.

Preferred qualifications

• Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Data Science, Business Analytics, Mathematics, or Computer Science.

• 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, including compliance and authorization processes.

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

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation or observability tooling.

• Prior consulting, solutions engineering, professional services, or embedded client work.

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:

$149,748.00 - $205,305.00

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.