Applied AI Architect, Public Sector (Federal Civilan)

Description

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco that builds reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems, with the aim of making AI safe and useful for its users and for society.

The team is a fast-growing group of researchers, engineers, policy experts and business leaders.

This is a pre-sales architect role on the Applied AI team. You become a trusted technical adviser to state and local government agencies, showing them what the company's AI can do and how to add it to their technology stack. A parallel version of the role covers federal civilian agencies.

You combine hands-on technical depth with customer-facing work to design new LLM solutions for complex mission problems, keeping the company's standards for safety and reliability.

You work with the sales, product and engineering teams to take customers from first technical discovery through to a working deployment. You help them understand the models' capabilities, build evaluations and design scalable architectures that get the most value from them.

Responsibilities

• Work with account executives to learn what each customer needs and turn it into a technical plan that fits their business goals.
• Act as the main technical adviser to enterprise customers at every stage, from discovery and initial evaluation to deployment, and coordinate across internal teams and stakeholders to make them succeed.
• Support customers building on the company's coding product, its API and its enterprise offering.
• Prepare technical material for different audiences, from deep dives for engineers and developers to business-value discussions for executives.
• Advise on architecture choices and help customers fit the models into their existing technology stack.
• Help customers set up evaluation frameworks that measure model performance on their own use cases.
• Spot recurring integration patterns and feed them back to the product and engineering teams.
• Travel often to customer sites for workshops, deep technical sessions and relationship building.
• Keep up with new developments in LLM capabilities and how they are put into practice.

Requirements

• Must have prior experience working with US federal, state and/or local agencies.
• You have 5+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as solutions architect, sales engineer or technical account manager.
• You have handled complex buying cycles involving several stakeholders.
• You build relationships easily and explain technical ideas to a wide range of people, from C-suite executives to engineering and IT teams.
• You translate customer requirements between technical and business stakeholders.
• You have designed scalable cloud architectures and integrated them with enterprise systems.
• You know Python.
• You are familiar with common LLM frameworks and tools, or you have a background in machine learning or data science.
• You enjoy cross-organizational collaboration, working through trade-offs and balancing competing priorities.
• You enjoy teaching, mentoring and helping others succeed.
• You can explain complicated topics in plain terms to internal and external stakeholders alike.
• You think creatively about using technology in ways that are safe and beneficial, and that advance safe AI systems.
• Security clearance is not required, but it is a plus.
• Minimum education is a Bachelor's degree or an equivalent mix of education, training and/or experience, in a field relevant to the role, shown through coursework, training or professional experience.
• Required years of experience depend on the internal job level for the position.

Conditions

The annual salary is $275,000 - $315,000 USD.

For sales roles, that range is On Target Earnings, covering both the sales commission or bonus target and annual base salary.

The location-based hybrid policy expects you to be in an office at least 25% of the time, and some roles may require more.

The company does sponsor visas, but it cannot do so for every role and every candidate. If it makes you an offer, it will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa and uses an immigration lawyer to help.

The company encourages people from underrepresented groups to apply even if they do not meet every qualification.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits.
• Optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave.
• Flexible working hours.