AI Engineer Remote — United States

About the Company

The American Psychological Association (APA) is a scientific and professional organization representing approximately 146,000 psychologists, students, and affiliates, primarily in the United States and Canada, as well as other countries. APA has approximately 500 employees and operates 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. This role works closely with engineering and business stakeholders to deliver production-ready, observable AI systems with measurable quality, strong safeguards, and continuous improvement.

The position requires hands-on experience developing production-grade Generative AI solutions, including agentic applications and RAG systems, along with full-stack development and AWS deployment experience.

Key Responsibilities

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

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

• Establish practical quality metrics for AI agents, including task success and tool-call accuracy, as well as retrieval relevance and coverage.

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

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

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

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

• Create and maintain technical documentation covering system architecture, interfaces, evaluation methods, and operational procedures.

• Work with product and business stakeholders to translate workflows into defined deliverables and assess results against measurable success criteria.

• Advise stakeholders 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 that improve system quality and reduce technical debt.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications 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 both multi-step, tool-calling agentic applications and RAG systems from development to production, with deep expertise in at least one and working knowledge of the other.

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

• Full-stack development experience using Angular and Node/TypeScript to deliver AI capabilities to users.

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

• Advanced Python skills for backend and AI service development.

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

• Understanding 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 indicators, including agent task success, and identify performance regressions.

• Working knowledge of AWS deployment using serverless services and/or containers, along with 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, CI/CD, and reliable release and rollback practices.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with a delivery-oriented mindset.

Work Schedule and Compensation

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

• Salary is determined based on several factors, including relevant years of experience, education level, and previous staff and/or governance experience at APA.

Location and Remote Work

• Remote work may be available under APA's Flexible Work Policy and requires approval.

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

Benefits

• 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, plus 12 paid holidays.

• Family and medical leave.

• Tuition assistance.

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Short-term and long-term disability insurance.

Additional Employment Information

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

The American Psychological Association is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to 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.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities. Applicants are entitled to information about their rights under federal employment laws through the Department of Labor's Know Your Rights notice.