{"id":1277016,"url":"https://alion.io/job/groundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer","title":"Senior Applied AI Engineer","company":{"id":2913152,"name":"Groundswell","domain":"gswell.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/gswell-com","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Washington, United States","New York, United States","United States","Mexico"],"countries":["US","MX"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":149748,"max":205305,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":205305},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"ServiceNow","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-21T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T04:05:54Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":25,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":25},"description":"Who Are We? \nGroundswell 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.\nWhat You'll do:\nWe are looking for an engineer who can turn ambiguous business problems into working AI solutions, and who recognizes when AI is not the answer.\nThis 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.\nThe 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.\nThe 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.\nResponsibilities\nLead discovery with business and technical stakeholders to understand the workflow, the decision being supported, and the current standard for acceptable results.\nDefine measurable success criteria before building, including accuracy targets, human review thresholds, acceptance conditions, and the definition of failure.\nRecommend 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.\nSelect 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.\nMake and defend architecture decisions on where a workload should run, weighing quality, cost, latency, security, and authorization constraints.\nBuild 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.\nBuild evaluation sets from real data and measure against them, iterating based on results rather than intuition.\nDetermine when a capability is ready for deployment, and identify when it is not.\nOperationalize capabilities in the client environment, including governance, logging, and traceability requirements.\nProduce clear documentation covering what the solution does, its known limitations, how it was validated, and what happens when it produces an incorrect result.\nMonitor quality, cost, latency, and drift after launch, and optimize as better or less expensive options become available.\nSet 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.\nRaise 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.\nContribute reusable patterns back to the team so that each project does not start from scratch.\nMove between client delivery, internal product work, rapid proofs of concept, and internal enablement as the work requires.\nRequired qualifications\n7+ years building and shipping production software.\nAt 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.\nDemonstrated experience evaluating AI system quality, including building test sets, defining metrics, and making deployment decisions based on evidence.\nStrong 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.\nProven ability to lead requirements conversations with non-technical stakeholders and translate what you hear into a technical approach.\nSound judgment on tradeoffs between accuracy, cost, latency, and complexity, with the ability to explain those tradeoffs to both engineers and executives.\nExcellent written communication. This role produces client-facing documentation and design rationale.\nAbility 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.\nA track record of improving the capability of other engineers, with or without a formal leadership title.\nU.S Citizenship required. Ability to obtain and maintain any federal government background investigation, suitability determination, or security clearance required by assigned client engagements.\nPreferred qualifications\nMaster’s degree in a relevant field such as Data Science, Business Analytics, Mathematics, or Computer Science.\nExperience with a low-code or application platform such as Appian, OutSystems, Mendix, Microsoft Power Platform, ServiceNow, or Salesforce.\nPublic sector or regulated-industry delivery experience, including compliance and authorization processes.\nExperience with cloud AI services such as AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI.\nFamiliarity with LLM evaluation or observability tooling.\nPrior consulting, solutions engineering, professional services, or embedded client work.\nSkills:\nCertification:\nWhy You’ll Never Want to Leave:\nComprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans \nFlexible Spending Account \n4% 401K Match (immediate vesting) \nPaid Time Off \nTuition reimbursement, certification programs, and professional development\nFlexible work schedule\nOn-site gym and childcare option \nThe 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:\n$149,748.00 - $205,305.00NOTE: 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.\nEqual 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.\nRead a copy of the Company’s Non-Discrimination Policy Statement.\nAdditional Resources:\nEO 13496 Notification of Employee Rights under NLRA\n\nKnow your rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal\n\nDisability 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  or 703-639-1777.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8065,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Flexible schedule","Professional development"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Government"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T02:00:41Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 4 · green card filings: 2","filings_12m":4,"filings_prev_12m":4,"green_card_filings_12m":2,"median_offered_wage_usd":122500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":3}],"liveness":{"score":80,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.887,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":25,"expected_fill_days":39,"reasons":["conf:25","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":205305,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/groundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/groundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T06:14:01Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3736,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2913152},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2913152"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fgroundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fgroundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fgroundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/groundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fgroundswell-senior-applied-ai-engineer"}]}