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Founding AI Engineer

TheDriveGroupArlington, VA🇺🇸United StatesPosted Sep 30, 2026

Quick Overview

Salary
$170k - $200k/yr
Seniority
Mid Senior
Work mode
On Site
Location
Arlington, VA, United States
Posted
15 hours ago
GCPSpringAWSMachine LearningNLPGenerative AIJavaLLMPython

Job Description

Job Description

We’re partnering with a high-growth software company building advanced open-source intelligence technology for complex, real-world intelligence environments.

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They’re making their first dedicated AI Engineering hire in the US - a key appointment that will work directly with the Co-Founder and senior Product leadership, with significant scope to influence the direction of their AI capability as the US engineering team grows.

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This isn’t a role focused on experimentation or building another AI proof of concept.

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You’ll be building production AI systems, Generative AI and agentic capabilities directly into an established software platform, solving complex problems across large volumes of structured and unstructured information.

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Important - US citizenship is required for this position

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Location: Arlington, VA

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On-Site is a strong preference

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Salary: $170k-$200k Base + Benefits (benchmarking)

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What You'll Do

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  • Design, build and productionise AI systems, GenAI and agentic AI capabilities
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  • Develop LLM-powered features and AI agents that solve complex, real-world intelligence problems
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  • Integrate new AI capabilities into an established enterprise software platform
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  • Take ideas from early prototype through to scalable, reliable production systems
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  • Work across AI architecture, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring and performance
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  • Build and deploy cloud-based AI services across AWS/GCP environments
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  • Work with large volumes of complex structured and unstructured information
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  • Partner closely with Product, Software Engineering and Data Science teams
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  • Work directly with the Co-Founder and Head of Product on the direction of the AI capability
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  • Help establish the foundations for a US AI Engineering team expected to grow to around five people
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What You'll Bring

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  • 5+ years' experience across Software Engineering, AI Engineering or Machine Learning Engineering
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  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production applications or systems
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  • Commercial experience building and deploying AI/ML systems into production
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  • Hands-on experience with LLMs, Generative AI and/or agentic AI
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  • Strong Python development skills
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  • Experience integrating AI capabilities into broader software products and platforms
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  • Cloud engineering experience across AWS, GCP or similar
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  • Understanding of AI evaluation, monitoring, reliability, scalability and performance
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  • Experience with modern AI frameworks, APIs and tooling
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  • Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work autonomously in an evolving environment
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  • Experience with Java/Spring, NLP, RAG, information retrieval or large-scale data platforms would be highly regarded
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This is a chance to get in at the beginning of a company's US AI Engineering capability, while still having the backing, product and customers of an established international software business.

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You'll work directly with senior leadership, have genuine influence over technical direction and help shape the engineering capability as the US team expands.

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Most importantly, you'll be working on AI systems that actually make it into production — tackling difficult engineering problems across GenAI, agents, large-scale information processing and intelligence software.

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