Software Engineer - AI

## About the job At Just Appraised, we're replacing outdated, manual local government workflows with modern software used by hundreds of government agencies across the United States. Our cutting-edge, AI-powered software, which leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP), replaces manual data entry to eliminate delays, backlogs, and errors. This work directly impacts how communities fund schools, infrastructure, and public services. ## About the Role We're hiring an AI Engineer to help build the systems behind our AI conversation engine and automation platform. You'll design and scale AI systems that generate responses, retrieve relevant knowledge, and connect LLM workflows to real government data systems. This is a role for engineers who enjoy building production AI systems with real applications and impact — not just prototypes. ## What You Will Work On - Designing scalable RAG pipelines for government knowledge bases - Building conversation engines with memory, context, and state - Implementing LLM tooling and function-calling for system integration - Designing evaluation harnesses and datasets for AI feature quality - Preventing hallucinations and improving grounded response generation - Scaling AI features across hundreds of government environments ## Tech Stack - Backend: Python - Data: PostgreSQL - AI Systems: LLMs, embeddings, vector retrieval, RAG pipelines - Infrastructure: AWS, Docker - Developer Tools: GitHub, Linear, Cursor, CI/CD, automated testing ## Your Role - Build and evolve our Conversation Engine: powering pre-drafted email, chat, and voice responses, including conversation state, memory, and high-quality response generation. - Own the RAG pipeline end-to-end: document ingestion, chunking strategies, embeddings, indexing, retrieval (hybrid/vector), reranking, and grounded response generation. - Implement AI Tooling / function calling: connect LLM workflows to internal systems (e.g., account lookup, case context retrieval, knowledge base queries) with strong validation and safe execution patterns. - Design evaluation and quality systems for AI features: offline eval harnesses, golden datasets, human feedback loops, monitoring for hallucinations/grounding, and regression prevention. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and ship new features. - Work closely with business stakeholders and customers to translate requirements into technical specifications and documentation. - Mentor and support engineering team members, promoting team efficiency and growth. - Troubleshoot and debug complex issues, ensuring timely resolution and platform stability. - Optimize application performance, reliability, and scalability, and uphold high standards for clean, maintainable code. - Identify and proactively address technical debt and performance bottlenecks to drive iterative product improvement. ## What We're Looking For - 2+ years of experience building production software, with strong proficiency in Python programming - 2+ y