AI Developer

About the role

We are looking for a highly skilled AI Developer to design, build, and optimize advanced AI solutions across predictive, generative, and autonomous system domains. This role requires strong hands-on engineering capabilities, deep familiarity with modern AI architectures, and the ability to translate mission needs into robust, production-ready AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Develop end-to-end AI solutions including LLM-powered applications, predictive ML models, multi-agent workflows, RAG pipelines, and specialized AI microservices.
• Implement reusable AI components, libraries, and APIs that streamline application development and accelerate delivery across programs.
• Integrate AI models with enterprise systems, APIs, data platforms, vector databases, and cloud-native services to deliver scalable mission capabilities.
• Drive iterative experimentation, prototyping, and model improvement cycles in collaboration with Data Scientists and AI Evaluation Scientists.
• Design and implement advanced prompt strategies, context management layers, retrieval systems, and LLM orchestration logic.
• Build scalable inference services, optimize model performance, and collaborate with LLMOps to enable robust deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Translate user needs and mission workflows into intuitive, reliable AI-powered features through active partnership with designers and product teams.
• Implement secure-by-design and trustworthy AI practices, including safety guardrails, input sanitization, content filtering, and integration of evaluation metrics.
• Contribute to internal AI frameworks, code patterns, and shared accelerators that raise delivery quality across the AI & Data Exploitation Practice.
• Mentor junior developers, conduct code reviews, and support engineering excellence across multi-disciplinary AI delivery teams.
• Stay current with emerging AI techniques, libraries, foundation models, and agent frameworks, evaluating their applicability to client missions.

Qualifications

• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the U.S. government.
• Bachelor’s degree and 5 years of relevant experience; OR Master's degree and 3 year of relevant experience; OR No degree and 9 years of relevant experience.
• Proficiency in Python; comfortable working across the AI/ML tooling ecosystem.
• Solid understanding of RAG architectures — chunking strategies, embedding models, vector stores, retrieval evaluation.
• Experience with at least one LLM orchestration framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, CrewAI, or equivalent).
• Strong prompt engineering skills — system prompts, few-shot design, chain-of-thought, and iterative refinement.
• Experience containerizing and deploying applications with Docker.
• Proficiency with Git and collaborative version control workflows.
• Ability to read and write REST APIs; comfortable integrating third-party services and models.
• Strong communication skills — you will interact with clients and translate fuzzy requirements into working systems.
• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the U.S. government.

Preferred

• Experience with cloud-native AI services, particularly AWS Bedrock for managed LLM inference.
• Familiarity with serverless compute (AWS Lambda) and managed ETL pipelines (AWS Glue) for data ingestion workflows.
• Working knowledge of vector and relational data stores including AWS RDS Postgres (pgvector) and OpenSearch.
• Container orchestration experience with Kubernetes for deploying and scaling AI services.
• CI/CD pipeline experience with Jenkins or similar build orchestration tools.
• Observability and logging experience for LLM pipelines — LangSmith, Arize, or equivalent.
• Working knowledge of LLM evaluation frameworks such as RAGAS or DeepEval for measuring RAG and model quality.
• Experience with workflow automation platforms — n8n, Prefect, Airflow, or similar.
• Experience designing multi-agent systems with agent-to-agent coordination patterns.
• Experience with graph databases (Neo4j, Memgraph) and Graph RAG approaches.
• Prior consulting, agency, or client-delivery experience.

Identity Statement

The projected compensation range for this position is $140,000 to $190,000. Annual salary is just one aspect of Steampunk’s total compensation package for employees. Learn more about additional Steampunk benefits here.

Skills

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Benefits

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Pay

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Schedule

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