Senior Applied AI Engineer, Federal
About The Position
Thread AI is hiring a Senior Applied AI Engineer to work directly with federal customers to build AI workflows and integrations on Lemma. Projects may involve connecting data spread across multiple systems, replacing manual handoffs, or making prototypes reliable enough for daily use. The engineer owns the engineering work through deployment and ongoing operation. This is a senior individual contributor role with direct customer responsibility. The engineer partners with an Applied AI Strategist, who leads workflow discovery, customer coordination, and adoption, while owning architecture and production code. They also work with Thread’s product and engineering teams on technical review and platform changes. Customer insights help shape Lemma’s future capabilities. The position is preferably based in New York City and involves travel of up to 30%.
Requirements
- Five or more years of software engineering experience, or comparable evidence of independently delivering and operating production systems.
- Strong programming skills in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, or a similar language.
- Ability to explain design choices, review code, and debug unfamiliar systems.
- Experience building APIs or integrations, working with databases and data pipelines, and using automated tests and deployment practices.
- Hands-on experience with AI or ML applications, including evaluating their outputs and understanding where they fail.
- Experience working directly with users or customer engineers to resolve incomplete requirements and make practical tradeoffs.
- Clear communication about progress and technical risks, and judgment to seek engineering review when needed.
- Formal technical education or equivalent practical experience is welcome.
- Applicant must be a U.S. citizen or national or a U.S. lawful permanent resident.
Nice To Haves
- Delivering software for federal customers or other organizations with demanding security and operational requirements.
- Building AI workflows involving external tools, retrieval, evaluation, or human review.
- Working with enterprise identity, cloud infrastructure, containers, or complex system integrations.
- Improving a shared product based on learning from a customer deployment.
- An active U.S. Secret security clearance or higher.
Responsibilities
- Work with users and customer engineers to define problems, map system dependencies, and agree on an initial deployment.
- Write production code connecting APIs, data sources, and customer applications to Lemma, and build and test the workflows that use those connections.
- Evaluate AI behavior against realistic examples, define checks for output quality and reliability, and determine where human review or approval is needed.
- Deploy and operate solutions with relevant engineering teams, diagnosing failures across application code, data, authentication, and network boundaries.
- Document technical decisions and operating procedures so customers and teammates can maintain delivered solutions.
- Turn recurring customer needs into reusable integrations and product improvements, collaborating with core engineering when a solution belongs in the platform.
- Help Growth assess technical feasibility and scope customer evaluations before delivery commitments are made.
Benefits
- Equity
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
