[Hiring] Applied AI Engineer @ICF

Role Description

ICF's Global Health and Development (GHD) line of business is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to build frontier-model systems for various global health and survey programs. This role will support the development of AI-enabled tools that:

• Draft survey reports
• Let researchers and policymakers analyze data in natural language
• Translate questionnaires into low-resource languages
• Support interviewers and data quality in the field

No tool is adopted unless it matches or beats the expert-led process it replaces. You will build the prompting, agent, and pipeline layer across the program, as well as the evaluation harnesses that show whether each tool actually works, judged against ground truth produced by experienced survey methodologists.

This position can be remote within the United States, with occasional travel. It is contingent upon award of program funding.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent years experience)
• Minimum 4 years of professional software development experience, including building LLM-powered systems that real users relied on in production
• U.S. citizenship is required by federal government contract

Requirements

• Proficiency in Python or another modern programming language (e.g., JavaScript/TypeScript, Go) for back-end and AI application development
• Hands-on experience building with frontier-model APIs (from any provider, or through any cloud platform), including tool use and retrieval-augmented generation
• Demonstrated experience designing LLM evaluations, including test-set construction, automated and human grading, regression testing, and ship/no-ship decisions
• Working knowledge of LLM cost, latency, and model-selection trade-offs
• Experience building and deploying on a major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud)
• Demonstrated experience using agentic coding tools, such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, or GitHub Copilot agent mode, to specify, review, test, and take ownership of production code
• Experience with agent frameworks and AI evaluation tooling

Preferred Skills

• Experience with tasks where ground truth came from subject matter experts (for example, statisticians, clinicians, scientists, or methodologists)
• Experience with grounded generation over structured or tabular data, or with LLM-assisted statistical analysis
• Experience with multilingual or low-resource-language NLP, translation, or speech
• Experience deploying open-weight models
• Experience with sensitive or regulated data, such as health data or human-subjects research
• Familiarity with model governance, monitoring, and responsible AI practice
• Experience in global health, international development, or low- and middle-income country settings
• Public work such as open-source contributions, published evaluations, or technical writing about systems you built

Professional Skills

• Explains AI trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including funders, survey experts, and partner-government staff
• Collaborates effectively across disciplines, cultures, time zones, and organizational levels while treating domain experts as the source of truth
• Communicates uncertainty, limitations, and negative results candidly
• Self-motivated
• Finds ways to add value without a lot of direct supervision

Pay Range

The pay range for this position based on full-time employment is: $98,614.00 - $167,644.00