AI Product Engineer (Washington DC-Baltimore Area)

About Nearly Human

Nearly Human is a small AI company deploying production AI systems into the U.S. defense environment. Our platform, LaunchGrid, helps federal agencies move AI out of isolated pilots and into secure, governed, mission-ready use.

We're building our engineering team around a different model: a small number of exceptionally strong engineers using modern coding agents to own problems end to end and ship production capabilities quickly.

The Role

You'll turn real customer workflows into production AI applications that people use repeatedly because they make their work better. You'll work directly from user problems rather than detailed specifications, ship small useful versions quickly, and improve them based on how they're actually used.

What You'll Do

• Build AI-enabled applications, agentic workflows, and tool-calling systems.
• Use coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Copilot as a core part of how you work.
• Integrate LLMs, APIs, databases, and enterprise systems.
• Build evaluations, testing, logging, and error handling that make AI reliable in production.
• Diagnose and fix problems in both AI-generated and human-written code.
• Start simple, and generalize only after a use case is proven.
• Own what you ship after launch.

What We Look For

• You've personally built and shipped complete products, ideally on a small team.
• You've built AI applications that real users rely on.
• You use AI coding tools extensively, and you understand, review, and validate everything they produce.
• You've worked across boundaries such as frontend, backend, data, and deployment.
• You've debugged hard production problems and made pragmatic architecture decisions.
• You know when to cut scope to ship faster.

Experience with Azure, or with government or other regulated environments, is a plus but not required.

We put very little weight on prestigious employers, universities, certifications, or long lists of languages and frameworks. We care about evidence of what you've built.

Why Join Us

• Your work matters immediately. We're a small team, and you'll own problems from start to finish.
• AI is both the product and how we build it. We expect engineers to use powerful coding agents aggressively.
• The mission is real. You'll deploy AI into consequential government environments.

Location

Remote. You must be based in the U.S. and authorized to work here. Some work may require eligibility for a security clearance.

How to Apply

No cover letter needed. Send your resume or LinkedIn profile to View email address on apply.placed-app.com, along with short answers to these four questions:

1. Show us something you've personally built that you're proud of. Share a GitHub repo, product, demo, pull request, or write-up, and briefly explain what you did yourself.
2. How do you currently use AI to develop software? Which tools do you use, how do you use them, and roughly how much of your workflow involves AI?
3. What's the hardest production problem you've personally solved in the last 12–24 months? What happened, what did you do, and what was the outcome?
4. Tell us about something meaningful you shipped unusually quickly. What let you move fast, and what did you deliberately choose not to build?