Lead Applied AI / GenAI Engineer

Come work at a place where innovation and teamwork come together to support the most exciting missions in the world!

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced engineer to design and deliver AI-powered applications, intelligent workflows, and automation solutions that drive measurable business impact. In this role, you'll operate at the intersection of enterprise application engineering, automation, data integration, and AI systems deployment. You'll apply strong systems thinking to connect model APIs, data sources, and workflow layers-unlocking improvements in speed, quality, and outcomes.

Focused on applied AI and GenAI, you will bridge emerging capabilities with real-world enterprise use cases, building and scaling production-grade AI solutions in a highly collaborative environment.

What You'll Do

• Build and deploy AI-enabled RAG pipelines and intelligent workflows that connect enterprise systems, data sources, model APIs, and automation layers using modern ML and LLMs
• Design and evolve backend services, APIs, and integrations, including retrieval, prompting, tool-calling, and orchestration patterns for use cases such as knowledge assistants, workflow automation, and decision support
• Leverage AI-assisted development to accelerate delivery, applying a strong "editor" mindset to rigorously review, secure, and standardize AI-generated code for reliability, security, observability, and documentation
• Develop and implement evaluation frameworks to measure output quality, retrieval accuracy, latency, and failure modes, and continuously improve system performance
• Lead structured problem formulation with cross-functional stakeholders (IT, Security, Data, HR, Finance, and business teams) to ensure AI is applied to high-impact, real-world problems
• Rapidly prototype solutions and scale them to production-grade deployments with appropriate guardrails, monitoring, and governance
• Optimize AI systems for performance, cost, scalability, and reliability in enterprise environments
• Collaborate with platform and data teams to effectively leverage enterprise data assets
• Build and contribute reusable components, frameworks, and playbooks to accelerate development and reduce duplication across the engineering ecosystem

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications

• 7-12+ years of experience in software engineering, applied AI, or ML engineering
• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML or GenAI applications in production, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow orchestration, API development, system integration, agent or tool calling, prompt design, evaluation frameworks, or AI observability
• Strong programming skills (Python + backend engineering)
• Experience integrating applications, data sources, or internal platforms through APIs, services, event-driven patterns, or workflow tools.
• Strong systems thinking and the ability to work across data, model, application, and infrastructure layers.
• Ability to operate with incomplete information, break down ambiguous problems, and move from concept to implementation with appropriate judgment.

Preferred Qualifications (Value-Adding Prior Experience)

• Experience with RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and LLM evaluation
• Familiarity with data engineering concepts (SQL, pipelines)
• Exposure to vector databases, embeddings, semantic search
• Experience integrating AI into enterprise workflows/applications
• Background in automation, intelligent agents, or workflow orchestration

Why Join Us

• Build high-impact AI solutions at enterprise scale
• Foundational role in shaping AI adoption strategy
• Work on cutting-edge AI with real business outcomes

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The salary range for this position is $165,000 - $185,000 per year. Final compensation will be determined based on several factors, including but not limited to skills, relevant experience, and work location. Please note this range reflects base salary and does not include incentive compensation or potential equity grants. We also offer a comprehensive and highly competitive benefits package.

Qualys is an Equal Opportunity Employer, please see our EEO policy.