AI Engineer

Role Description

Anika Systems is an outcome-driven technology solutions firm that guides federal agencies in solving complex business challenges and preparing for the future. Our services span AI Strategy, Data Intelligence, AI & Machine Learning, Intelligent Automation, Enterprise Platforms, and Engineering, with a specialized focus on National Security and Federal Financial programs. We are dedicated to delivering forward-thinking solutions that accelerate the critical missions of our government clients. Through our VITAL Innovation Lab, we invest heavily in research and development to anticipate mission needs and deliver cutting-edge solutions.

This position is currently remote; however, in accordance with federal contract requirements and company policy, there may be future changes to work location expectations. Candidates should be prepared for the possibility of a return to the office, either partially or fully, based on client directives, contractual obligations, or company policies. Any such changes will be communicated in advance.

Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain a government suitability clearance.

The AI Engineers will design and deliver production AI systems across our commercial platform work and our federal modernization programs. This is a hands-on builder role on a small, senior team. Engineers own work end-to-end including:

• Data
• Model integration
• Services
• UI
• Infrastructure
• Security
• Deployment

You will be expected to make sound technical calls under federal compliance, security, and procurement constraints.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field; Master’s is a bonus.
• 1-3 years of professional experience building and shipping ML or NLP systems, including focus on LLM based or Generative AI solutions.
• Strong production experience in Python and TypeScript, with modern web frameworks on both sides (e.g. FastAPI, React).
• Hands-on integration of LLMs into real applications — streaming, tool/function calling, token accounting, and failure handling — across at least one of OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex, or Azure OpenAI.
• Experience designing agentic systems: multi-step workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Solid relational data modeling on PostgreSQL with an async ORM and migration tooling.
• AWS fluency (compute, storage, IAM, secrets, networking, observability) and infrastructure-as-code, ideally Terraform.
• Practical understanding of OAuth / OIDC, JWT, RBAC, multi-tenant isolation, and least-privilege design.
• Disciplined testing, linting, and type-checking habits; reviewable diffs and clear written communication.

Requirements

• Federal program exposure: NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, FISMA, ATO process, or agency-specific data-handling requirements.
• Experience with Keycloak or another OIDC provider, RLS-based multi-tenancy, or zero-trust application design.
• Working knowledge of a data/lakehouse platform (Databricks, Snowflake) and SQL beyond CRUD.
• Document AI / OCR pipelines and modernization of legacy enterprise workflows.
• Production observability (CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, Grafana) and incident-response experience.
• Supply-chain hardening: SBOMs, dependency scanning, signed builds, threat modeling.