Senior/Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation focused on improving government services. The Senior/Principal Software Engineer (AI) will lead the development of scalable AI solutions, bridging advanced models with enterprise platforms, while collaborating with government stakeholders and engineering teams to enhance digital products and services.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end development of advanced AI solutions, including agentic systems, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent workflows
• Design, build, and optimize LLM-powered autonomous agents, workflow orchestrations, and RAG frameworks
• Create integrations to connect AI agents with enterprise data systems, APIs, and services. Focus on explainable AI and responsible AI principles
• Develop and refine machine learning models and generative AI applications
• Architect end-to-end AI infrastructure, define guardrails, access controls, responsible-AI checks, and compliance protocols to ensure ethical, secure model deployment, model versioning, deploy and manage AI agents on cloud platforms using CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code
• Implement monitoring, logging, and observability for agent interactions, monitor model drift, system latency, and token economics to maintain cost-per-use efficiency and system reliability
• Develop metrics for evaluating and monitoring AI performance
• Contribute to technical documentation, prototyping strategies, and recommendations for future scaling
• Guide multi-disciplinary teams of software engineers, data engineers, and data scientists, setting the technical playbook and best practices

Requirements:

• Proven experience designing and building production-grade systems using modern programming languages (e.g., Python, TypeScript, or similar)
• Strong background in product engineering — translating user and product requirements into reliable, maintainable, and well-tested software
• Advanced proficiency in Python
• Hands-on experience with multiple LLMs, developing or integrating generative AI applications, and building autonomous AI agents
• Experience with AI/ML technologies, ML frameworks, and implementation of GenAI and Agentic AI frameworks
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, cloud computing platforms(AWS), containerization (Docker), and infrastructure as code (Terraform) for deploying AI applications
• Strong understanding of API and system integration design, cloud architecture, and data workflows
• Demonstrated ability to work iteratively—rapidly prototyping, testing, and improving features based on real-world feedback
• Strong grounding in security, privacy, and accessibility principles, particularly when handling sensitive or regulated data
• Excellent collaboration skills with cross-functional partners including design, product, and research
• Legal authorization to work in the United States
• Ability to meet any other requirements for government contracts for which candidates are hired
• Work authorization that doesn't require visa sponsorship, now or in the future
• May be subject to a government background check or security clearance, depending on the contract