Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Cato Institute is a public policy research organization dedicated to principles of individual liberty and limited government. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Applied AI to build and maintain AI-integrated workflows across their technology platforms, focusing on both a React-powered content platform and a Python research platform.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain sophisticated agent skills and agentic tooling that integrate AI across engineering and operational workflows
• Integrate AI content retrieval systems, such as Sanity’s Agent Context, into production workflows
• Build services (e.g., API and MCP endpoints) that surface Cato’s 50 years of policy research for diverse consuming applications
• Build and extend features, components, and shared packages across both the TypeScript / React content platform and the Python research and operations platform
• Extend and harden core infrastructure packages across both platforms: API client integration, streaming data pipelines, document processing, and structured logging
• Maintain testing infrastructure across both platforms, closing coverage gaps and integrating tests into continuous integration workflows
• Contribute to the content platform’s march toward production, picking up feature work, migration tasks, and building pipeline improvements
• Develop familiarity with both codebases through Cato’s AI development infrastructure — project instruction files, quality enforcement hooks, and structured reasoning frameworks that provide persistent architectural context and catch errors in real time
• Build out test suites for both platforms, prioritizing high-dependency packages and critical paths