AI Engineer, Junior — United States

About the Company

The American Psychological Association (APA) represents 146,000 psychologists, students, and affiliates, primarily in the United States and Canada, as well as other countries. APA is a scientific and professional organization with approximately 500 employees. It is classified as a 501(c)(3) organization, alongside its 501(c)(6) companion organization, APA Services, Inc.

About the Role

APA is seeking an AI Engineer to design, build, and operate agentic AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) services that automate multi-step business workflows safely and reliably.

In this role, you will partner with engineering and business stakeholders to deliver deployable and observable AI systems with measurable quality, strong safeguards, and continuous improvement. You will work across agentic applications, RAG solutions, cloud services, and full-stack delivery while adapting to evolving AI tools and best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop agentic AI applications that perform multi-step tasks with defined tool boundaries, permissions, and safety controls.

• Build and maintain end-to-end RAG solutions, including ingestion, embeddings, retrieval, and generation, with a focus on relevance, latency, and reliability.

• Define practical quality metrics for AI agents, including task success and tool-call correctness, and for retrieval systems, including relevance and coverage.

• Evaluate system performance and continuously improve results based on quality metrics.

• Integrate tools and data sources through MCP or similar standard interfaces to provide secure, reusable access.

• Develop Angular and Node interfaces and APIs that make agentic AI and RAG capabilities accessible to business teams.

• Deploy and operate AI services on AWS, including Lambda, ECS, and EKS, with appropriate logging, monitoring, error handling, retries, fallbacks, and guardrails.

• Identify high-value repetitive processes and deliver AI-driven automation layers that integrate with enterprise systems and platforms.

• Create and maintain technical documentation covering architectures, interfaces, evaluation methods, and operational runbooks.

• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to translate workflows into well-defined deliverables and validate outcomes against measurable success criteria.

• Provide advisory support on opportunities to improve operational efficiency through agentic workflows and RAG-enabled automation.

• Research and recommend emerging AI tools, evaluation methods, and responsible AI practices to reduce technical debt and improve system quality.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field. Equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

• 5–10 years of software engineering experience, including 1–2 years building production-grade Generative AI solutions involving agentic applications and/or RAG.

• Hands-on experience taking agentic applications involving multi-step tasks and tool calling, as well as RAG systems, from development to production.

• Deep expertise in at least one of these areas and solid working knowledge of the other.

• Experience building and deploying production services and APIs on AWS, with attention to reliability, latency, and cost.

• Experience with full-stack delivery using Angular and Node/TypeScript.

• Familiarity with CI/CD and standard operational practices, including automated builds and releases, monitoring, and alerting.

Required Technical Skills

• Advanced Python skills for backend and AI service development, along with Angular and Node/TypeScript for full-stack delivery.

• Practical experience with at least one agent framework, such as LangChain, LangGraph, or CrewAI.

• Knowledge of safe tool-calling design, including clear tool boundaries, permissions, and validation.

• Strong understanding of RAG concepts, including chunking, embeddings, retrieval, and basic reranking.

• Experience with at least one vector store, such as OpenSearch, Pinecone, or pgvector.

• Ability to evaluate and improve AI systems using practical quality signals, including agent task success, and identify regressions.

• Working knowledge of AWS deployment using serverless services and/or containers, including logging, monitoring, and alerting.

• Familiarity with responsible and secure AI practices, including least privilege, data access controls, and guardrails.

• Experience with Git-based source control and CI/CD, including reliable release and rollback practices.

• Clear communication skills and a collaborative, delivery-oriented mindset.

Additional Responsibilities

• Advise stakeholders on opportunities to improve operational efficiency through agentic workflows and RAG-enabled automation.

• Research and recommend emerging AI tools, evaluation approaches, and responsible AI practices that support system quality and reduce technical debt over time.

Work Schedule

APA operates on a 37.5-hour work week, with one-hour lunch breaks each day.

Location and Remote Work Policy

This position may be eligible for remote work under APA's Flexible Work Policy and is subject to approval.

Remote employees may not work from the following states or U.S. territories: Alaska, California, Colorado, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, U.S. Virgin Islands, Washington, Wyoming.

Salary Considerations

APA determines salaries based on several factors, including years of relevant experience, education level, and previous staff and/or governance experience at APA.

Benefits

APA offers a comprehensive employee benefits program that includes:

• Remote work and flexible scheduling.

• 401(k) plan with an employer match of up to 4%.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance options.

• Outpatient mental health benefit.

• Paid personal and vacation time.

• 12 paid holidays.

• Family and Medical Leave.

• Tuition assistance.

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Short-term and long-term disability insurance.

Background Check

Final candidates must successfully complete a background check as a condition of employment. Any required consent forms and additional information will be provided during the final stages of the hiring process.

Equal Employment Opportunity

The American Psychological Association is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, personal appearance, familial status, family responsibilities, matriculation, political affiliation, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, or local law.

This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights under federal employment laws. Applicants may review the Department of Labor's Know Your Rights notice for further information.