Senior AI Product Engineer

Citian•Washington, DC

4d•$150,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Citian is a fast-growing, venture-backed SaaS technology company based in Washington, DC, building software for transportation and infrastructure systems. The Senior AI Product Engineer turns customer problems into reliable AI-enabled product capabilities. This role works across the stack, prototyping quickly, validating value and correctness, and moving successful experiments into production. It calls for sound judgment about when AI is appropriate and when conventional software is a better solution, as well as comfort working with ambiguous requirements and collaborating with engineering, data science, and customer-facing teams to identify valuable applications of AI for transportation agencies. The engineer will build and ship AI-enabled product features end to end, integrate model-based capabilities with Citian’s existing software and data architecture, and establish evaluations and release criteria to ensure quality. The role also emphasizes traceability of AI-generated results, customer isolation and permissions, protection against prompt injection, and ongoing ownership of production performance, reliability, cost, monitoring, and incidents.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.
At least 5 years of experience building production software, including shipped LLM features used by customers.
Ability to take an ambiguous product problem through technical discovery, implementation, evaluation, and production delivery.
Experience designing and running LLM output evaluations, including test sets, correctness and grounding measures, regression gates, and methods to catch wrong answers before customers do.
Full-stack product skills, including Python or TypeScript back ends, SQL and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, APIs, and enough front-end skills to ship a feature end to end.
Experience with production practices including code review, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and cost tracking.
Effective daily use of AI coding tools and agents for implementation, testing, and investigation, with independent validation of their output.
Clear written English and substantial overlap with US Eastern hours.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Snowflake, AWS (including Bedrock), or LLMs over analytical or structured data.
Experience with geospatial, transportation, public-sector, or other complex, high-stakes data.
Experience with security and compliance work around customer data, including multi-tenant isolation, authorization, audit, or SOC 2.
Experience leading a feature end to end across teams.

Responsibilities

Work with product, design, Customer Success, and data science to understand agency problems and validate where AI adds value.
Design, build, and ship AI-enabled product capabilities end to end, from data access through the application.
Integrate model-based features into existing software and data architecture without creating unnecessary AI infrastructure, and document key design decisions.
Design and maintain evaluations for AI features, covering correctness, grounding, authorization, appropriate abstention, and regression detection.
Establish practical release criteria and use production feedback to improve feature quality.
Make AI-generated results traceable to their underlying data, queries, and assumptions.
Enforce customer isolation and users’ permissions, including for tools that retrieve or query data, and guard against prompt injection.
Own production features, including latency, cost, reliability, monitoring, failure modes, and incident response.
Select appropriate techniques for each problem, weighing accuracy, cost, speed, and time to market.