APPLIED AI ENGINEER (1042) - Department of Technology

San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Sfmta) • San Francisco, CA

45d • Hybrid

About The Position

Are you ready to make an impact in one of the most innovative cities? The Department of Technology (DT) is looking for passionate IT professionals to help shape the future of technology in San Francisco! As the centralized technology services provider for the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF), DT delivers critical infrastructure and services to over 33,000 employees—supporting public safety, municipal broadband, cybersecurity, cloud solutions, and more! With a $140M+ annual budget and a team of 300+ experts, DT is leading the charge in digital transformation. DT provides services through our core areas of IT Excellence: IT Project Management Office Enterprise Application Services Cloud Center of Excellence IT Operations and Support including the Service Desk and NOC City Infrastructure including the Network, Telcom and Data Centers Office of Cybersecurity including Cyber Defense, Identity Management and Disaster Recovery Public Safety Systems and Municipal Broadband Fiber SFGovTV Broadcasting Services IT Finance and Administration Services Emerging Technologies Why Join Us? Innovative & Impactful Work At DT, you won't just work on IT—you'll power a city. Your expertise will directly impact the residents of San Francisco, from closing the digital divide to ensuring secure, efficient city operations. Benefits of Working for CCSF: In addition to challenging and rewarding work, the City provides a generous suite of benefits to its employees. Competitive pay, benefits, and retirement options Career growth opportunities through training, internal mobility, and subsidized education Diverse work environment in a diverse city We offer employees the ability to work from home one day a week while spending the other four days in our San Francisco office, promoting both collaboration and work-life balance We are committed to ensuring that the City services are inclusive, efficient, equitable, and culturally competent for San Franciscans of all races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sextual orientations. This commitment requires comprehensive review and thorough analysis of existing practices and policies to remove barriers to real inclusion. We are also committed to ensuring that we have a safe, equitable, and inclusive workplace for individuals of all races. This includes creating opportunities for hiring, promotion, training, and development, for all employees, including but not limited to, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). We are a small, mission-driven team leading responsible AI adoption across City government within DT. We work on: Testing and making self-service AI tools available to other departments, Setting technical standards for safe and responsible AI use, and Building and experimenting with prototypes that demonstrate the potential of applied AI. As our Applied AI Engineer, your primary focus will be designing and backend AI cloud infrastructure needed to power AI services. This includes building ingestion pipelines, managing vector databases, integrating LLM APIs, and ensuring backend systems are reliable, observable, scalable, and safe. This role is hands-on, creative, and highly collaborative — ideal for someone who enjoys working at the intersection of technology, product, and impact.

Requirements

• An associate degree in computer science, computer engineering, information systems, or a closely related field from an accredited college or university OR its equivalent in terms of total course credits/units [i.e., at least sixty (60) semester or ninety (90) quarter credits/units with a minimum of twenty (20) semester or thirty (30) quarter credits/units in one of the fields above or a closely-related field].
• One (1) year of experience analyzing, installing, configuring, enhancing, and/or maintaining the components of an enterprise network.
• Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of two (2) years). One (1) year is equivalent to thirty (30) semester units/r forty-five (45) quarter units with a minimum of 10 semester / 15 quarter units in one of the fields above or a closely related field.
• Completion of the 1010 Information Systems Trainee Program may be substituted for the required degree.
• Strong experience with backend/ platform engineering
• Experience building and managing RAG pipelines using vector databases and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph).
• Hands-on experience with observability practices and tools
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerized deployments
• Ability to work collaboratively in a small, cross-functional team and move quickly on pilots.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of search and ranking techniques (hybrid search, rerankers).
• Familiarity with data security, privacy, and compliance in government or regulated contexts.
• Background in ML/AI infrastructure (model serving, caching, fine-tuning workflows).
• Experience contributing to technical documentation and standards.
• Motivated by public impact and eager to shape how AI can responsibly improve services for residents.
• A builder and experimenter who takes a human-centered approach and loves creating prototypes that make AI real and useful.
• Excited by the challenge of making AI safe, transparent, and practical in government.
• Flexible and collaborative, comfortable stepping outside your core skill set to help the team succeed.
• Keen to stay current with emerging technologies

Responsibilities

• Build and manage RAG infrastructure and other cloud tools as needed (e.g., ingestion pipelines, embedding services, retrieval APIs, orchestration).
• Deploy and maintain vector databases and integrate them with AI services.
• Develop APIs and backend services that connect prototypes to LLMs and retrieval systems.
• Implement observability practices including monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance metrics to ensure system reliability and transparency.
• Use frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and related libraries to orchestrate retrieval workflows, agents, and hybrid pipelines.
• Ensure system scalability and resilience, with production-ready practices.
• Collaborate with the AI Product Engineer to integrate backend services with front-end applications and user pilots.
• Contribute to standards for safe, responsible AI adoption (data governance, security, and compliance).
• Experiment with new backend, platform, and cloud tools to stay current with the fast-evolving AI ecosystem.

Benefits

• Competitive pay, benefits, and retirement options
• Career growth opportunities through training, internal mobility, and subsidized education
• Diverse work environment in a diverse city
• We offer employees the ability to work from home one day a week while spending the other four days in our San Francisco office, promoting both collaboration and work-life balance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Associate degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees