Senior AI Applications Engineer - Columbia, MD

Your tasks

• Own technical architecture and implementation decisions for the team’s AI applications, documenting key decisions and tradeoffs.
• Provide technical leadership to junior developers and interns, including assigning and scoping technical work, reviewing code, and guiding their growth.
• Establish engineering standards for code review, testing, CI/CD, security, and documentation.
• Set up and manage hosting, deployment pipelines, and data integrations on Azure and internal platforms.
• Build, test, deploy, and maintain LLM-powered applications and AI agents.
• Develop tools to assess, grade, and triage RFIs, solicitations, and related requests.
• Automate proposal and project artifacts, including requirements traceability matrices, CDRL deliverables, presentations, and related documentation.
• Build document-processing pipelines using OCR, structured extraction, retrieval, and other AI techniques.
• Integrate AI applications with enterprise tools, internal systems, APIs, and data sources.
• Move prototypes into production through testing, monitoring, error handling, and performance improvements, and prepare documentation and handover so solutions can be supported long term.
• Partner with the AI Lead, end users, and technical teams to assess feasibility, refine requirements, and advise on technical risks and tradeoffs.

Your qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience building and shipping production software in Python.
• Hands-on experience with LLM application development, including RAG, tool use/function calling, agents, and output evaluation.
• Experience applying SysML or comparable systems-engineering modeling methods to document requirements, system architecture, interfaces, behavior, or traceability
• Experience leading technical work, including code reviews, mentoring, and making architectural decisions with minimal oversight.
• Experience with APIs, SQL, enterprise integration, and cloud or on-premises deployment, including CI/CD pipelines; Azure experience is preferred.
• Ability to work effectively with evolving requirements and establish engineering practices in a developing environment.
• Strong communication skills with both technical colleagues and business users.
• A team-oriented approach, with a willingness to share knowledge, support colleagues, give and receive constructive feedback, and contribute to shared outcomes.
• In order to be considered, candidates must be a U.S. Person capable of obtaining a Public Trust clearance. Preferred Experience:
• Self-hosted or local language models
• Agent frameworks or Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• OCR, document AI, or intelligent document processing
• Government proposals, CDRLs, or DIDs
• Startup, early-stage, or newly established technical initiatives

Interested?