Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Cato Institute • Washington, DC

1d • Onsite

About The Position

The Cato Institute is seeking a qualified candidate for the Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI position. This role involves working on two parallel technology platforms: a React-powered Next.js content platform and a Python research and operations platform. The engineer will contribute to features, infrastructure, testing, and AI integration across both platforms. The development environments utilize AI agent orchestration, structured reasoning frameworks, automated quality enforcement, and strict type systems. The position requires strong engineering fundamentals and comfort within an AI-empowered development loop, as well as building and improving the underlying agent skills. The Senior Software Engineer will join a technically ambitious team focused on the intersection of policy scholarship, modern software engineering, and AI-integrated workflows. The projected salary range for this role is $100,000 - $190,000 per year, with compensation based on the candidate's background, experience, and skills. Cato Institute is a public policy research organization founded in 1977, dedicated to individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Cato Institute is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in any field
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including work on production systems
• Expertise with multiple major LLMs: Claude, ChatGPT, and/or Gemini
• Expertise with agentic AI development tools (Claude Code, Codex, or similar), including authoring reusable agent capabilities — agent skills, structured workflows, and tool integrations — not just using them
• Proficiency in TypeScript / React or Python, with demonstrated ability to work productively in languages and frameworks outside your primary expertise
• Experience building or integrating LLM-enabled systems — prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, or evaluation pipelines
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, version control, CI/CD, code review, and systems design
• Comfort working across the stack — backend services, frontend components, data pipelines, and build infrastructure
• Clear written and verbal communication; ability to document systems and explain technical decisions to non-engineers
• Self-directed, adaptable, and comfortable with ambiguity in a small team where priorities shift
• Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. This position does not offer visa sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Cato’s work or demonstrated interest in public policy
• Familiarity with headless CMS platforms, content modeling, or structured content systems
• Experience building streaming or pipeline-based data processing systems
• Experience with AI output evaluation frameworks or quality benchmarking tools
• Experience authoring and maintaining agent skills (such as Claude/Claude Code Skills) or comparable agentic workflow packages
• Familiarity with think tank, research, government, or academic technology environments

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain sophisticated agent skills and agentic tooling that integrate AI across engineering and operational workflows
• Integrate AI content retrieval systems, such as Sanity’s Agent Context, into production workflows
• Build services (e.g., API and MCP endpoints) that surface Cato’s 50 years of policy research for diverse consuming applications
• Build and extend features, components, and shared packages across both the TypeScript / React content platform and the Python research and operations platform
• Extend and harden core infrastructure packages across both platforms: API client integration, streaming data pipelines, document processing, and structured logging
• Maintain testing infrastructure across both platforms, closing coverage gaps and integrating tests into continuous integration workflows
• Contribute to the content platform’s march toward production, picking up feature work, migration tasks, and building pipeline improvements
• Develop familiarity with both codebases through Cato’s AI development infrastructure — project instruction files, quality enforcement hooks, and structured reasoning frameworks that provide persistent architectural context and catch errors in real time
• Build out test suites for both platforms, prioritizing high-dependency packages and critical paths

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer contribution to a Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Generous vacation and sick days
• Paid parental leave
• Employer-provided life and disability insurance
• 401(k) employer match
• Transit/Parking benefits
• Pet discount plan

What This Job Offers

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