AI Engineer

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

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field; Master’s is a bonus. 

• Experience: 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, ideallyTerraform.

• 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.

Preferred Skills

• 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.