Senior AI Product Engineer

Citian • Washington, DC

3d

About The Position

Citian is a fast-growing, venture-backed SaaS technology company based in Washington, DC. Its software supports transportation and infrastructure systems, including roads, rail, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian networks. The company’s solutions aim to reduce traffic fatalities, enhance pedestrian accessibility, and help system operators save time and money.

The Senior AI Product Engineer is a product-minded, full-stack software engineer who turns customer problems into dependable AI-enabled product capabilities. The role builds and ships production LLM features, distinguishes reliable products from demos, prototypes quickly, and validates both the usefulness and correctness of features. It involves working across engineering, data science, product, design, Customer Success, and customer-facing teams to identify where AI can create real value for transportation agencies—and where conventional software is more suitable.

The engineer will deliver capabilities end to end, integrate model-based features into existing software and data architecture, and own them in production. This includes evaluating quality, protecting customer data and permissions, making generated results traceable, and managing latency, cost, reliability, monitoring, failure modes, and incident response. The position calls for selecting appropriate techniques based on accuracy, cost, speed, and time to market.

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.
• Demonstrated ability to take an ambiguous product problem through technical discovery, implementation, evaluation, and production delivery.
• Experience designing and running evaluations for LLM output, including test sets, correctness and grounding measures, regression gates, and catching wrong answers before customers do.
• Full-stack product skills, including Python or TypeScript back ends, SQL and relational databases such as PostgreSQL, APIs, and sufficient front-end skills to ship a feature end to end.
• Production engineering 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 solid 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.
• Security and compliance experience involving 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 identify and validate where AI adds value and where it does not.
• Design, build, and ship AI-enabled capabilities within products end to end, from data access through the application.
• Integrate model-based features into the existing software and data architecture without unnecessary AI infrastructure, and record key design decisions.
• Design and maintain evaluations for AI features, including 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 each user's permissions, including when tools retrieve or query data, and guard against prompt injection.
• Own production features, including latency, cost, reliability, monitoring, failure modes, and incident response.
• Choose appropriate techniques—including prompting, tool use, retrieval, text-to-SQL, fine-tuning, or no AI—while weighing accuracy, cost, speed, and time to market.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous paid time off.
• 401(k) company match.
• Monthly commuter transportation benefit.
• On-site gym.
• Free snacks in the office.
• High-growth potential and opportunities for advancement within a fast-growing, venture-backed SaaS startup.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior