About the role

Scale's Global Public Sector team uses AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. As an Applied AI Engineer, you'll build AI that runs inside production systems used by national health and government organisations.

You'll own scoped components of those systems, such as a model integration, agent tool, API, data pipeline, or evaluation, from implementation through to delivery. Senior engineers set the system-level design and client commitments, so you can go deep on making your components work reliably on real data.

What you'll do

Own the implementation, testing, and delivery of defined AI components within an established system design
Build agent tools, model integrations, and the backend services and APIs they depend on
Run and extend evaluations within an established framework, interpret results, investigate common failure modes, and flag regressions
Debug production issues in the components you own and resolve them using the team's engineering practices
Communicate progress and blockers early, and take responsibility for delivery dates within your scope
Work directly with client teams on the requirements and feedback for your components
Share what you learn with the team as you build public sector domain expertise

What we look for

Experience building and shipping production software, with proficiency in Python and working knowledge of at least one of TypeScript, Java, or C++
Hands-on experience integrating models or AI/ML components into a production application, such as calling LLMs, building retrieval or agent tooling, or deploying a trained model
A working understanding of ML evaluation: how to read results, spot regressions, and identify common causes of model failure
Experience owning a defined piece of work through testing, release, and production debugging
Strong problem-solving skills and a data-driven approach to iterating on models and datasets
Clear written and verbal communication, including raising blockers and trade-offs early

Nice to have

A backend or full-stack engineering background, so you can work across the API, service, and data-schema layers of the systems you contribute to
Experience with cloud ML platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
Exposure to agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, or context engineering
Experience handling regulated or sensitive data

Where this role sits

Your primary accountability covers production AI behaviour, its backend integration, and the evaluation required for a specific customer. Senior Full-Stack Engineers own the complete user-facing application and its infrastructure. ML Research Engineers lead novel agent architecture and the benchmark methodology used across accounts. The roles work together on agents and evaluation, with accountability set by the scope of the problem.

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.