APPLIED AI ENGINEER (1042) - Department of Technology

Department: DT/Emergent Technology
Job class: 1042 IS Engineer
Salary range: [$138,684.00 - $174,434.00] annually
Hours: Full-time.
Role type: Permanent Exempt (PEX), Full Time position is excluded by the Charter from the competitive civil service examination process and shall serve at the discretion of the appointment officer. The anticipated duration of this project position is thirty-six (36) months and will not result in an eligible list or permanent civil service hiring. Project-based positions cannot be ongoing or exceed 36 months.

About:

• Application Opening: Monday, November 10, 2025
• Application Deadline: This job will close no sooner than Monday, November 24, 2025 (11:59 PM).

Department Description:

Are you ready to make an impact in one of the most innovative cities? The Department of Technology (DT) is looking for passionate IT professionals to help shape the future of technology in San Francisco! As the centralized technology services provider for the City and County of San Francisco (CCSF), DT delivers critical infrastructure and services to over 33,000 employees—supporting public safety, municipal broadband, cybersecurity, cloud solutions, and more! With a $140M+ annual budget and a team of 300+ experts, DT is leading the charge in digital transformation. DT provides services through our core areas of IT Excellence:

• IT Project Management Office
• Enterprise Application Services
• Cloud Center of Excellence
• IT Operations and Support including the Service Desk and NOC
• City Infrastructure including the Network, Telcom and Data Centers
• Office of Cybersecurity including Cyber Defense, Identity Management and Disaster Recovery
• Public Safety Systems and Municipal Broadband Fiber
• SFGovTV Broadcasting Services
• IT Finance and Administration Services
• Emerging Technologies

Why Join Us? Innovative & Impactful Work At DT, you won’t just work on IT—you’ll power a city. Your expertise will directly impact the residents of San Francisco, from closing the digital divide to ensuring secure, efficient city operations.

Benefits of Working for CCSF: In addition to challenging and rewarding work, the City provides a generous suite of benefits to its employees.

• Competitive pay, benefits, and retirement options
• Career growth opportunities through training, internal mobility, and subsidized education
• Diverse work environment in a diverse city
• We offer employees the ability to work from home one day a week while spending the other four days in our San Francisco office, promoting both collaboration and work-life balance

We are committed to ensuring that the City services are inclusive, efficient, equitable, and culturally competent for San Franciscans of all races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sextual orientations. This commitment requires comprehensive review and thorough analysis of existing practices and policies to remove barriers to real inclusion. We are also committed to ensuring that we have a safe, equitable, and inclusive workplace for individuals of all races. This includes creating opportunities for hiring, promotion, training, and development, for all employees, including but not limited to, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

Telecommute option: This is a hybrid role requiring on-site work at our San Francisco office. Occasional travel within San Francisco may be required

We are a small, mission-driven team leading responsible AI adoption across City government within DT.

We work on:

• Testing and making self-service AI tools available to other departments,
• Setting technical standards for safe and responsible AI use, and
• Building and experimenting with prototypes that demonstrate the potential of applied AI.

As our Applied AI Engineer, your primary focus will be designing and backend AI cloud infrastructure needed to power AI services. This includes building ingestion pipelines, managing vector databases, integrating LLM APIs, and ensuring backend systems are reliable, observable, scalable, and safe.

This role is hands-on, creative, and highly collaborative — ideal for someone who enjoys working at the intersection of technology, product, and impact.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and manage RAG infrastructure and other cloud tools as needed (e.g., ingestion pipelines, embedding services, retrieval APIs, orchestration).
• Deploy and maintain vector databases and integrate them with AI services.
• Develop APIs and backend services that connect prototypes to LLMs and retrieval systems.
• Implement observability practices including monitoring, logging, alerting, and performance metrics to ensure system reliability and transparency.
• Use frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, and related libraries to orchestrate retrieval workflows, agents, and hybrid pipelines.
• Ensure system scalability and resilience, with production-ready practices.
• Collaborate with the AI Product Engineer to integrate backend services with front-end applications and user pilots.
• Contribute to standards for safe, responsible AI adoption (data governance, security, and compliance).
• Experiment with new backend, platform, and cloud tools to stay current with the fast-evolving AI ecosystem.

Education:

An associate degree in computer science, computer engineering, information systems, or a closely related field from an accredited college or university OR its equivalent in terms of total course credits/units [i.e., at least sixty (60) semester or ninety (90) quarter credits/units with a minimum of twenty (20) semester or thirty (30) quarter credits/units in one of the fields above or a closely-related field].

Experience:

One (1) year of experience analyzing, installing, configuring, enhancing, and/or maintaining the components of an enterprise network.

Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of two (2) years). One (1) year is equivalent to thirty (30) semester units/r forty-five (45) quarter units with a minimum of 10 semester / 15 quarter units in one of the fields above or a closely related field.

Completion of the 1010 Information Systems Trainee Program may be substituted for the required degree.

Desirable Qualifications:
Must-Have Skills

• Strong experience with backend/ platform engineering
• Experience building and managing RAG pipelines using vector databases and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph).
• Hands-on experience with observability practices and tools
• Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerized deployments
• Ability to work collaboratively in a small, cross-functional team and move quickly on pilots.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Knowledge of search and ranking techniques (hybrid search, rerankers).
• Familiarity with data security, privacy, and compliance in government or regulated contexts.
• Background in ML/AI infrastructure (model serving, caching, fine-tuning workflows).
• Experience contributing to technical documentation and standards.

Who You Are

• Motivated by public impact and eager to shape how AI can responsibly improve services for residents.
• A builder and experimenter who takes a human-centered approach and loves creating prototypes that make AI real and useful.
• Excited by the challenge of making AI safe, transparent, and practical in government.
• Flexible and collaborative, comfortable stepping outside your core skill set to help the team succeed.
• Keen to stay current with emerging technologies

Note: Applicants must meet the minimum qualification requirement by the final filing date unless otherwise noted.

One-year full-time employment is considered equivalent to 2000 hours (2000 hours of qualifying work experience is based on a 40hour work week). Any overtime hours that you work above forty (40) hours per week are not included in the calculation to determine full-time employment.

• 
  Information About the Hiring Process

• Conviction History

• Employee Benefits Overview

• Equal Employment Opportunity

• Disaster Service Worker

• ADA Accommodation

• Veterans Preference

• Right to Work

• Copies of Application Documents

• Diversity Statement

Applicants will receive a confirmation email from notification@careers.sf.gov that their online application has been received in response to every announcement for which they file. Applicants should retain this confirmation email for their records. Failure to receive this email means that the online application was not submitted or received.

Applicants may be contacted by email about this recruitment and, therefore, it is their responsibility to ensure that their registered email address is accurate and kept up-to-date. Also, applicants must ensure that email from CCSF is not blocked on their computer by a spam filter. To prevent blocking, applicants should set up their email to accept CCSF mail from the following addresses (@sfgov.org, @sfdpw.org, @sfport.com, @flysfo.com, @sfwater.org, @sfdph.org, @asianart.org, @sfmta.com, @sfpl.org, @dcyf.org, @first5sf.org, @famsf.org, @ccsf.edu, @smartalerts.info, and @smartrecruiters.com).

Exam Analyst Information: If you have any questions regarding this recruitment or application process, please contact the analyst at jason.wong3@sfgov.org

The City and County of San Francisco encourages women, minorities and persons with disabilities to apply. Applicants will be considered regardless of their sex, race, age, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition (associated with cancer, a history of cancer, or genetic characteristics), HIV/AIDS status, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, military and veteran status, or other protected category under the law.