Senior Applied AI Engineer, Federal

About Thread AI Thread AI is focused on building an AI orchestration engine and is looking for dedicated individuals to join its growing team. Our goal is to make infrastructure simple for enterprises and public sector agencies seeking to get the most from AI and AI Agents. Headquartered in New York, our growing team is a group of experts who have a track record of creating and executing against complex workflows and infrastructure.

About the Role You will work directly with federal customers to build AI workflows and integrations on Lemma. The work may start with data spread across several systems, a process full of manual handoffs, or a prototype that needs to become reliable enough for daily use. You will own the engineering through deployment and ongoing operation. You will partner with an Applied AI Strategist who leads workflow discovery, customer coordination and adoption. You will own the architecture and production code, working with Thread’s product and engineering teams on technical review and platform changes. What you learn from customers will help determine what we build into Lemma next. This is a senior individual contributor role with direct customer responsibility.

• Work with users and customer engineers to define the problem, map system dependencies and agree on a first deployment.

• Write production code that connects APIs, data sources and customer applications to Lemma. Build and test the workflows that use those connections.

• Evaluate AI behavior against realistic examples. Define checks for output quality and reliability, and decide where a person needs to review or approve a result.

• Deploy and operate the solution with the relevant engineering teams. Diagnose failures across application code, data, authentication and network boundaries.

• Document technical decisions and operating procedures so customers and teammates can maintain what you ship.

• Turn recurring customer needs into reusable integrations and product improvements. Work with core engineering when a solution belongs in the platform.

• Help Growth assess technical feasibility and scope customer evaluations before delivery commitments are made.

What we’re looking for

• Five or more years of software engineering experience, or comparable evidence of independently delivering and operating production systems.

• Strong programming skills in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or a similar language. You can explain your design choices, review code and debug unfamiliar systems.

• Experience building APIs or integrations, working with databases and data pipelines, and using automated tests and deployment practices.

• Hands-on experience with AI or ML applications, including evaluating their outputs and understanding where they fail.

• Experience working directly with users or customer engineers to resolve incomplete requirements and make practical tradeoffs.

• Clear communication about progress and technical risks, and the judgment to seek engineering review when needed.

Relevant backgrounds include product engineering, previous FDE work, and implementation engineering with substantial production coding. We welcome formal technical education and equivalent practical experience.

Nice to haves

• Delivering software for federal customers or other organizations with demanding security and operational requirements.

• Building AI workflows that involve external tools, retrieval, evaluation or human review.

• Working with enterprise identity, cloud infrastructure, containers or complex system integrations.

• Improving a shared product based on what you learned from a customer deployment.

Why Thread AI You will work with a founding team that built AI products at Palantir and with the engineers building Lemma. You will see how customers use what you ship and help turn their needs into capabilities that other teams can use. The role gives you responsibility for a customer deployment and a direct contribution to the product behind it. We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, or age, we encourage you to apply! Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and the company but your past experience doesn’t align with every qualification, we still encourage you to apply anyway - we’d love to get to know you and see if there’s a place for you at Thread!

Compensation The annual base pay range is $180,000-$230,000, plus equity. An active U.S. Secret security clearance or higher is preferred, but not required. Applicant must be a U.S. citizen or national or U.S. lawful, permanent resident. This is a full-time position, preferably based in New York City. Travel: Up to 30%.