Applied AI Engineer, Government

OpenAI · Washington, DC · $211K – $302K · Engineering

Posted 2026-09-08

Apply for this role →

About the Team

The mission of the Applied AI Engineering team is to enable the secure and impactful implementation of GenAI solutions. We serve as technical thought partners and trusted advisors to our clients, ideating high-value use cases and providing the hands-on guidance necessary to drive projects into production. In this role within the Government team, you will empower agencies to evolve their operations through automated content synthesis, advanced search capabilities, and bespoke applications leveraging our latest foundational technologies and models.

About the Role

We are looking for a driven solutions leader with a product mindset to partner with our public sector customers and ensure they achieve tangible value with GenAI. You will pair with government agencies (federal, state, and local), policymakers, and other public institutions to establish a GenAI strategy and identify the highest value applications. You’ll then partner with their technical teams, subject matter experts, systems integrators, and implementation partners to move from prototype through production. You’ll take a holistic view of their needs and design an architecture using the OpenAI API and other services to maximize customer value. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Global Affairs, Applied Research, and Product teams.

This role is based in Washington, DC. We offer relocation support to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Deeply embed with our most sophisticated public sector customers as the technical lead, serving as their technical thought partner to ideate and build novel applications on our API and other OpenAI foundational technologies like Codex.

- Work with senior customer stakeholders to identify the best applications of GenAI in their industry and to build/qualify a comprehensive backlog to support their AI roadmap.

- Intervene directly to accelerate customer time to value through building hands-on prototypes and/or by delivering impactful strategic guidance, often in collaboration with systems integrators and implementation partners.

- Forge and manage relationships with our customers’ and implementation partners’ leadership and stakeholders to ensure the successful deployment and scale of their applications.

- Contribute to our open-source developer and enterprise resources.

- Scale the Deployment Engineering function through sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing notebooks to our internal and external repositories.

- Validate, synthesize, and deliver high-signal feedback to the Product, Engineering, and Research teams.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

- Bring 7+ years of technical consulting (or equivalent) experience with public sector customers (U.S. federal preferred), bridging technical teams and senior stakeholders.

- Have successfully led GenAI or traditional ML implementations for government agencies in close collaboration with systems integrators and implementation partners.

- Understand network and cloud architecture, including experience with on-premise deployments.

- Are an effective and polished communicator who can translate business and technical topics to all audiences.

- Have industry experience in programming languages like Python, Go, or Typescript.

- Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.

- Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.

- Are an effective, high throughput operator who can drive multiple concurrent projects and prioritize ruthlessly.

Apply for this role →

← Back to all jobs