AI Engineer

About BLEN

BLENers are passionate about using technology to solve real-world problems. For over 20 years, we've helped government agencies and businesses transform their digital experience - modernizing legacy systems, building cloud-native applications, and experimenting with what's just around the corner. We value long, enduring partnerships and put humans at the center of every experience. Our team thrives on turning tricky problems into solutions that are practical, accessible, and performant.

About this position

We're hiring an AI Engineer to help our federal and commercial clients ship production-grade applications powered by large language models - with a strong focus on agentic systems and MCP-based integrations .

You'll spend your time building real things: agents that take actions on behalf of users, RAG pipelines that ground answers in trusted sources, and MCP servers that securely connect models to the data and tools our clients already rely on. You'll wire up model APIs, design tool interfaces, build evals, and make sure what we ship is fast, reliable, observable, and safe.

This isn't a research role. You won't be training foundation models. You will be designing and shipping agentic AI systems that real users - including senior government stakeholders - depend on, and you'll have a strong voice in how we adopt generative AI responsibly across our portfolio.

If you get excited about agent design, tool use, MCP, evals, and the weekly firehose of new models and frameworks - and you want that energy pointed at meaningful public-sector work - this is for you.

What You'll Do

• Design and build agentic systems - multi-step agents that plan, call tools, retrieve context, and take action with appropriate human-in-the-loop checkpoints
• Build MCP servers and clients to securely expose client data, internal tools, and APIs to LLMs in a standardized, auditable way
• Ship LLM-powered applications: copilots, document intelligence, search, summarization, and workflow automation
• Design and maintain RAG pipelines - chunking, embeddings, vector stores, retrieval, reranking, and grounding
• Integrate model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, open-weight models) and pick the right model for the job based on quality, latency, and cost
• Develop evals and observability for agents and AI features so we know what's working in production and what's regressing
• Apply prompt engineering , structured outputs, function/tool calling, and guardrails to make agent behavior predictable
• Write production Python backends and APIs that expose AI capabilities to web and mobile clients
• Collaborate with engineers, designers, and product folks to scope what AI should (and shouldn't) do in a given product
• Help shape responsible AI practices for federal use - privacy, security, auditability, and human oversight

Basic qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1 year shipping LLM-based or AI-powered features to production
• Hands-on experience designing or building agentic systems - tool calling, multi-step reasoning, planning loops, or agent orchestration (LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude tool use, or equivalent)
• Working knowledge of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - or demonstrated ability to pick it up quickly, plus familiarity with the broader landscape of agent/tool standards
• Strong Python and experience building and deploying backend services and APIs (FastAPI, Flask, or similar)
• Hands-on experience with at least one major LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, Vertex, or open-weight models via vLLM/Ollama)
• Working knowledge of RAG : embeddings, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or similar), and retrieval evaluation
• Comfort with prompt engineering, structured outputs (JSON mode, schemas), and tool/function calling
• Experience writing evals - even lightweight ones - for non-deterministic systems
• Solid SQL and experience with relational and unstructured data
• Familiarity with at least one cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Git, code review, and modern collaborative workflows
• Strong written and verbal communication - you can explain AI tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience authoring MCP servers for non-trivial systems (databases, internal APIs, document stores)
• Experience with eval and observability platforms (Braintrust, LangSmith, Langfuse, Arize, or custom harnesses)
• Multi-agent orchestration patterns and experience reasoning about agent failure modes
• Fine-tuning, distillation, or LoRA experience where it actually moved the needle
• Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD for AI workloads
• TypeScript/Node for full-stack AI features
• Streaming UIs (SSE, WebSockets) and token-level UX patterns
• Experience with caching, prompt compression, and cost/latency optimization at scale
• Background supporting federal or government clients
• Awareness of NIST AI RMF, FedRAMP, or related responsible-AI frameworks

Requirements

• Must be a US Citizen or legal resident, able to work domestically
• Must be able to attain a low-level security clearance
• Must work from the United States

Perks

• Work from anywhere.
• The chance to work on high-visibility projects and make a significant impact.
• Competitive salary range ($130,000 - $200,000+) based on role requirements and your experience and impact.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• Up to 20+ days of PTO annually.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan.
• FSA/HSA and commuter benefit options.
• Professional development opportunities, certifications, and continuous learning support.
• Company-provided technology and access to productivity and AI tools.
• Additional bonus based on performance.

Get to know us

We're a small, creative, highly technical team. Our heroes are the scrappy folks who dare to dream and do great things. We care more about doing the right thing than taking shortcuts. We finish projects. We surprise our clients with how much we genuinely care about their success. We're selective about our partners - and our people. We don't say "human resource" because you're not a resource. You're a teammate, and we'll treat you like one.

What you should expect from us

• We will treat you fairly
• We give you space to grow personally and professionally
• We will hear your ideas even when we disagree
• We will be honest about our challenges and equitable with our success
• We will tell you the truth, even when it's difficult

What to Expect in Our Hiring Process

Our hiring process typically consists of 3 interview stages, after an initial screening. For engineering roles, the process may include additional technical assessments depending on the position's requirements. We aim to make the process straightforward and respectful of your time.

$130,000 - $150,000 a year

This range represents the compensation we expect to offer candidates who can perform the core responsibilities with minimal additional training. Actual compensation may vary based on skill set, experience, certifications, and scope of responsibility.

Equal Opportunity

BLEN is an Equal Opportunity Employer / Protected Veterans / Individuals with Disabilities.

We may use AI tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are made by humans.

We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm authorization to work in the U.S. Due to the nature of our federal work, all BLEN roles must be performed from the contiguous United States.

We participate in E-Verify. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. Due to the nature of our work with the federal government, all roles at BLEN are required to work from the contiguous United States.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.