AI Integration Engineer

Who You Are:

As an AI Integration Engineer at Citian, you'll lead efforts incorporating AI into our products, bridging civil engineering domain knowledge with practical AI implementation. You will work alongside our Engineering, Data, and Research teams to build scalable processes and find solutions to improve our data integrity.  You will be expected to prototype ideas, assess third-party tools and models, and translate technical findings into actionable product decisions. You are resourceful, innovative, and continuously seek opportunities to improve processes and drive efficiency. Your strong communication and collaboration skills enable you to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders. If you are passionate about applied AI Engineering and are eager to contribute to the success of a startup, we would love to hear from you.

Expected Duties:

• Serve as the domain bridge between civil/transportation engineering knowledge and AI capabilities, evaluating whether AI outputs meet real-world infrastructure standards and directing the team accordingly.
• You will help to balance product strategy and research by working with our research team on prompting techniques, model capabilities, domain specific finetuning
• Help lead our efforts to get models to perform how we want them to, including enabling models with tool use and other techniques to get the best out of the LLMs.
• Work closely with our Data team and specific datasets that can be used for continued pre-training, RLHF, in-context-learning (ICL), and other applications.
• Lead AI image recognition and computer vision strategies for infrastructure asset data extraction assessing model approaches, overseeing implementation, and validating outputs against domain benchmarks.
• Contribute to fine-tuning strategy for transportation/infrastructure-specific models by collaborating with the research team on domain adaptation, benchmarking, and model evaluation.
• Evaluate and recommend third-party AI tools, APIs, and foundation models relevant to Citian's use cases, balancing build vs. buy tradeoffs in coordination with Engineering.
• Own and manage the application of AI to QA/QC processes; directing strategy, evaluating outputs for domain accuracy, and iterating with the Data team to continuously improve data quality and integrity.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field
• 5+ years of professional experience through work or personal projects
• 3+ years of AI focused experience ideally within a product environment
• Strong understanding of Computer Science topics such as optimization and algorithms
• Understanding of Python/SQL code and ability to retrieve and store data safely through a back end
• Familiarity with RESTful APIs and back-end concepts sufficient to prototype, test, and evaluate integrations. Hands-on implementation experience a plus but not required.
• Experience with cloud services, specifically AWS, and the ability to leverage its features for scalable back-end AI solutions is highly desired. (S3, Lambda Functions)
• Experience with computer vision or AI image recognition applications, even at a prototyping or evaluation level.
• Meaningful exposure to civil engineering, transportation infrastructure, or geospatial data, sufficient to critically evaluate AI outputs in these domains and communicate credibly with domain experts.
• Capacity to communicate solutions with teammates