AI Engineer

AI Engineer

The AI Engineer is Lasting Change's first dedicated AI role, joining an established Data & Innovation team focused on advancing the organization's data and analytics capabilities. This position will design, build, and deploy AI-powered solutions that improve staff effectiveness and enhance services for clients. Initial focus areas include surfacing insights from complex documentation, reducing administrative burden, and supporting faster, more informed decision-making across programs and operations.

Working closely with organizational stakeholders and the broader data team, the AI Engineer will leverage curated data assets from Petra, Lasting Change's Microsoft Fabric-based enterprise data lakehouse, to deliver practical, trustworthy, and mission-aligned AI solutions. As the organization's AI capabilities mature, this role will help establish the standards, platforms, and practices that support long-term success.

In the performance of their respective tasks and duties, all employees are expected to conform to the following:

• Design and build LLM-powered applications that help staff work more effectively — including document processing, content generation, and conversational interfaces.
• Engineer prompt pipelines with structured outputs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and tool-use patterns tailored to organizational data and workflows.
• Evaluate, select, and integrate best-in-class LLM and AI platform tooling, with preference for Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Foundry, and complementary services.
• Ensure AI applications are reliable, auditable, and designed with responsible AI principles, including transparency, fairness, and appropriate human oversight.

• Design and deploy agentic workflows that automate multi-step processes, reducing manual effort and improving consistency across operations.
• Build and integrate MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to connect AI agents with organizational data sources, internal tools, and external services.
• Collaborate with operational stakeholders to identify, scope, and deliver automation opportunities with clear business value.
• Contribute to a disciplined, iterative approach to AI development — shipping focused solutions, learning from them, and expanding scope over time.

• Partner closely with the internal data team to leverage curated, trusted datasets from Petra as inputs to AI systems and pipelines.
• Collaborate on data modeling and governance decisions that support AI use cases without compromising platform integrity.
• Ensure all AI pipelines are integrated with the organization's data platform, security standards, and access controls.
• Use Python and SQL fluently across prototyping, feature engineering, and production pipeline development.

• Engage directly with program leaders, operations staff, and leadership to understand business problems and define AI solutions with clear, measurable outcomes.
• Communicate AI system behavior, limitations, and results in plain language to non-technical audiences.
• Champion responsible, explainable AI use across the organization — ensuring solutions are trustworthy and aligned with Lasting Change's mission and values.
• Maintain thorough documentation of all AI systems, prompt designs, agentic workflows, and integration patterns to support maintainability and knowledge transfer.

• Contribute to AI engineering standards and tooling choices that can scale as the organization's capability grows.
• Leverage AI-assisted development practices to maximize engineering velocity across prototyping, documentation,…