APPLIED AI ENGINEER (1042) Department of Technology

We are a small mission-driven team leading responsible AI adoption across City government within DT.  

We work on:  

1.  Testing and making self-service AI tools available to other departments 
2. Setting technical standards for safe and responsible AI use and 
3. Building and experimenting with prototypes that demonstrate the potential of applied AI. 

As our Applied AI Engineer your primary focus will be designing and backend AI cloud infrastructure needed to power AI services. This includes building ingestion pipelines managing vector databases integrating LLM APIs and ensuring backend systems are reliable observable scalable and safe. 

This role is hands-on creative and highly collaborative ideal for someone who enjoys working at the intersection of technology product and impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and manage RAG infrastructure and other cloud tools as needed (e.g. ingestion pipelines embedding services retrieval APIs orchestration).
• Deploy and maintain vector databases and integrate them with AI services.
• Develop APIs and backend services that connect prototypes to LLMs and retrieval systems.
• Implement observability practices including monitoring logging alerting and performance metrics to ensure system reliability and transparency.
• Use frameworks like LangChain LlamaIndex and related libraries to orchestrate retrieval workflows agents and hybrid pipelines.
• Ensure system scalability and resilience with production-ready practices.
• Collaborate with the AI Product Engineer to integrate backend services with front-end applications and user pilots.
• Contribute to standards for safe responsible AI adoption (data governance security and compliance).
• Experiment with new backend platform and cloud tools to stay current with the fast-evolving AI ecosystem.

Qualifications :

Education:

An associate degree in computer science computer engineering information systems or a closely related field from an accredited college or university OR its equivalent in terms of total course credits/units i.e. at least sixty (60) semester or ninety (90) quarter credits/units with a minimum of twenty (20) semester or thirty (30) quarter credits/units in one of the fields above or a closely-related field.

Experience:

One (1) year of experience analyzing installing configuring enhancing and/or maintaining the components of an enterprise network.

Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of two (2) years). One (1) year is equivalent to thirty (30) semester units/r forty-five (45) quarter units with a minimum of 10 semester / 15 quarter units in one of the fields above or a closely related field.

Completion of the 1010 Information Systems Trainee Program may be substituted for the required degree.

Desirable Qualifications:
Must-Have Skills

• Strong experience with backend/ platform engineering
• Experience building and managing RAG pipelines using vector databases and orchestration frameworks (LangChain LlamaIndex LangGraph).
• Hands-on experience with observability practices and tools
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS GCP or Azure) and containerized deployments
• Ability to work collaboratively in a small cross-functional team and move quickly on pilots.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Knowledge of search and ranking techniques (hybrid search rerankers).
• Familiarity with data security privacy and compliance in government or regulated contexts.
• Background in ML/AI infrastructure (model serving caching fine-tuning workflows).
• Experience contributing to technical documentation and standards.

Who You Are

• Motivated by public impact and eager to shape how AI can responsibly improve services for residents.
• A builder and experimenter who takes a human-centered approach and loves creating prototypes that make AI real and useful.
• Excited by the challenge of making AI safe transparent and practical in government.
• Flexible and collaborative comfortable stepping outside your core skill set to help the team succeed.
• Keen to stay current with emerging technologies

Note: Applicants must meet the minimum qualification requirement by the final filing date unless otherwise noted. 

One-year full-time employment is considered equivalent to 2000 hours (2000 hours of qualifying work experience is based on a 40hour work week). Any overtime hours that you work above forty (40) hours per week are not included in the calculation to determine full-time employment. 

Additional Information :

• Information About the Hiring Process 

• Conviction History 

• Employee Benefits Overview 

• Equal Employment Opportunity 

• Disaster Service Worker 

• ADA Accommodation 

• Veterans Preference 

• Right to Work 

• Copies of Application Documents 

• Diversity Statement 

Applicants will receive a confirmation email from  that their online application has been received in response to every announcement for which they file. Applicants should retain this confirmation email for their records. Failure to receive this email means that the online application was not submitted or received. 

Applicants may be contacted by email about this recruitment and therefore it is their responsibility to ensure that their registered email address is accurate and kept up-to-date. Also applicants must ensure that email from CCSF is not blocked on their computer by a spam filter. To prevent blocking applicants should set up their email to accept CCSF mail from the following addresses (@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and @). 

Exam Analyst Information:If you have any questions regarding this recruitment or application process please contact the analyst at

The City and County of San Francisco encourages women minorities and persons with disabilities to apply. Applicants will be considered regardless of their sex race age religion color national origin ancestry physical disability mental disability medical condition (associated with cancer a history of cancer or genetic characteristics) HIV/AIDS status genetic information marital status sexual orientation gender gender identity gender expression military and veteran status or other protected category under the law.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time