AI Innovation Engineer

We are seeking a hands-on creative and technically strong AI Innovation Engineer to support our client delivery teams in bringing modern AI solutions to life within public-sector organizations. This role is focused on client enablement prototyping and cross-functional engagementhelping our clients understand the potential of AI design proofs-of-concept and build working prototypes that demonstrate value in their specific mission context.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical skills (especially with GenAI LLMs data pipelines and cloud-native services) with the ability to collaborate across disciplinesworking with DevSecOps teams cloud working groups data stewards and communities of practice to drive AI adoption and build momentum. Youll play a critical role in bridging the gap between strategy and execution demonstrating how AI can solve real-world problems and catalyze digital transformation.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of technical innovation and human-centered impact. Youll help our clients not only understand what AI can do but also show them how through prototypes pilots and practice. Youll be an early advocate for the latest AI service offerings that are available for our clients. Youll join a collaborative forward-leaning culture that values exploration rapid iteration and practical impact. Youll contribute to the growth of our AI & Data Exploitation Practice.

Your key contributions include:

• Client AI Enablement & Education
  • Serve as a trusted advisor to the client organization on modern AI capabilities best practices and responsible use
  • Develop AI education materials tutorials demo videos and onboarding sessions that are tailored to the client organizations needs
  • Lead or support AI enablement events such as workshops lunch-and-learns innovation sprints and capability briefings
• Prototyping & Proof-of-Concepts
  • Design and implement AI prototypes and proof-of-concept solutions tailored to specific mission use cases (e.g. summarization entity extraction classification semantic search)
  • Work with cloud platform teams to integrate prototypes into modern cloud environments (e.g. AWS Bedrock GCP Vertex AI Azure OpenAI)
  • Leverage RAG pipelines orchestration frameworks (LangChain LlamaIndex) and LLM APIs to rapidly deliver working demos
• Cross-Functional Integration
  • Participate in communities of practice and cross-team working groups (e.g. cloud data architecture cybersecurity) to ensure AI adoption is aligned with broader modernization goals
  • Share findings prototype patterns and reusable components across delivery teams to accelerate reuse and scale impact
  • Serve as a liaison between data scientists platform engineers and user-facing teams to ensure end-to-end viability of AI solutions
• Standards Security & Compliance
  • Ensure all AI solutions are designed with responsible AI principles data sensitivity awareness and security-first practices
  • Collaborate with compliance and governance stakeholders to vet tools define usage boundaries and mitigate risks in AI application

• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the US government.
• Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning or a related field.
• 3 years of experience in software engineering data engineering or applied AI/ML roles.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with modern GenAI tooling such as:
  • OpenAI (GPT-4) Claude Gemini Llama 3
  • LangChain LlamaIndex or similar RAG frameworks
  • AWS Bedrock GCP Vertex AI Azure OpenAI Service
  • Vector databases (e.g. FAISS Pinecone Weaviate Chroma)
• Strong Python development skills with familiarity in building data pipelines API wrappers and lightweight front-ends for demos.
• Ability to build and present AI-powered demos to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Familiarity with DevSecOps and CI/CD principles.
• Familiarity with GitHub.
• Experience engaging with external clients or business stakeholders in a consultative role.
• Relevant Professional Certification(s)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience delivering AI capabilities into federal government agencies or highly regulated industries.
• Experience customizing AI services for biomedical or health research.
• Understanding of NIST AI Risk Management Framework and other public-sector digital policy memos.
• Hands-on knowledge of data governance PII handling and compliance-aware prototyping.
• Exposure to Human-Centered Design practices user research synthesis or journey mapping.
• Prior involvement in standing up or contributing to an AI Community of Practice or Innovation Hub.

Identity Statement

As part of the application process you are expected to be on camera during interviews and assessments. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud.

Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland Federal Civilian Health and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges. As an employee owned company we focus on investing in our employees to enable them to do the greatest work of their careers and rewarding them for outstanding contributions to our growth. If you want to learn more about our story visit .

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex national origin disability status protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law. Steampunk participates in the E-Verify program.