Software Engineer - AI Focus (Center for Technology in Education)

The Center for Technology in Education in the School of Education at Johns Hopkins University seeks a Software Engineer - AI Focus to continue the development of AI-powered data tools for early intervention programs. In this role, the Software Engineer extends the build of an interactive dashboard that helps Part C teams explore their Child Outcomes Summary (COS) data and receive guidance grounded in that data and in national technical assistance resources. The position owns the application end to end, from data processing and the user interface to its AI capabilities and their evaluation. The role involves working independently with a domain expert who calibrates the work at key milestones, and calls for sound engineering judgment, fluency with generative AI, and vigilance over the privacy of sensitive education data.

Responsible for the creation, implementation, maintenance, performance, production support and documentation of various departmental and enterprise-wide application systems. This includes but is not limited to the installation, modification, and testing of new and/or upgraded applications (packages or homegrown), operating systems, file structures, hardware, communication devices, and productivity tools. Applies analysis techniques and procedures to gather and then translate business requirements into functional/technical specifications and designs. Using functional specifications and designs, produces all or part of the deliverables. Maintains databases and application system code.

Responsible for full life cycle of medium to large sized complex projects; strong technical skills; strong ability to understand complex business processes. Develops solutions based on extensive technical knowledge, skills and experience; influences client towards innovative/integrated solutions.

Specific Duties & Responsibilities

- The responsibilities listed below are typical examples of the work performed by this position.
- Not all duties assigned to this position are included, nor is it expected that everyone in this position will be assigned every job responsibility.

Analysis & Requirements Gathering

- Define complex business/clinical/education problems by meeting with clients to observe and understand current processes and the issues related to those processes. Provide written documentation of findings to share with the client and other IT colleagues.
- Gather complex system requirements by meeting with clients and researching existing technology to understand the business requirements and possible solutions for new applications.

Design & Development

- Develop detailed tasks and project plans by analyzing project scope and milestones for complex projects to ensure product is delivered quickly according to software lifecycle standards.
- Write functional/technical specifications from the complex system requirements, putting them into functional and technical descriptions for use by programmers and business analysts to develop technical solutions.
- Develop/change data input, files/database structures, data transformation, algorithms, and data output by using appropriate computer language/tools to provide technical solutions for complex application development tasks.
- Document code and associated processes by adhering to development methodologies, adding code comments and appropriate documentation to various knowledge-base system(s) to simplify code maintenance and to improve support.
- Provide monitoring and guidance in application design and development to more junior staff.
- Provide thought leadership in designing and developing innovative integrated solutions.

Testing & Documentation

- Create and document complex test scenarios using the appropriate testing tools to validate and verify application functionality.
- Test all changes by using the appropriate complex test scenarios to ensure all delivered solutions work as expected and errors are handled in a meaningful way.
- Author and maintain documentation by writing audience-appropriate materials to serve as technical and/or end-user references.
- Mentor junior staff in testing tools and technologies by reviewing their work.

Implementation & Maintenance

- Implement changes by adhering to the change management policies and procedures for any given project to communicate to all parties the nature, significance, and risk factors of the solution.
- Monitor changes and resolve complex problems by responding as they occur, by reviewing all processing and output of the newly implemented solution, and by proactively ensuring the solution works successfully to satisfy the customer requirements and to provide a smooth transition to the new solution.
- Provide support by investigating and resolving issues, including complex issues to ensure prompt, effective service.

In addition to the duties described above

- Application Development: Design, build, maintain, and document an AI-powered data application, from data intake and processing to the interface practitioners use to explore their data.
- AI Capabilities: Design and build the generative AI features, including retrieval-augmented generation over authoritative domain sources, that help practitioners interpret their data and receive evidence-grounded answers to their questions.
- Evaluation and Quality: Establish how the system's outputs are measured and improved over time and pair quantitative evaluation with review by domain experts.
- Privacy and Responsible Use: Design for the privacy of sensitive personally identifiable information and for the responsible, cost-effective use of AI services.
- Collaboration: Work closely with the Frontend UX Engineer and domain experts to align the application's data, AI features, and interface with the needs of practitioners.

Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's Degree (or foreign equivalent) in computer science, computer information systems, information technology, electronic engineering, or a related field.
- Five years of related work experience with computer systems and applications.
- Additional education may substitute for required experience and additional related experience may substitute for required education beyond HS Diploma/Graduation Equivalent, to the extent permitted by the JHU equivalency formula.

Preferred Qualifications

- Knowledge in the assigned application as well as the platform on which it runs.
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building data-driven applications (e.g., in Python).

- Demonstrated experience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems (e.g., vector databases such as Pinecone or FAISS, knowledge graphs, retrieval evaluation with Recall@K or MRR).

- Demonstrated experience designing LLM-powered features (e.g., prompt engineering, tool-using agents).

- Experience building and deploying web applications (e.g., React, serverless functions on Netlify or AWS Lambda).

- Experience evaluating AI systems with both quantitative measures and human review (e.g., faithfulness and relevancy metrics, review by domain experts).

- Strong understanding of privacy and security practices for sensitive data (e.g., data minimization, API key management).

- A portfolio that shows AI systems you have built and evaluated (e.g., retrieval pipelines, agents, evaluation results).

- Experience with client-side data processing (e.g., in-browser Python with Pyodide).

- Experience preparing document collections for retrieval (e.g., web crawling, document parsing, text cleaning).

- Experience with education or public-sector data (e.g., early intervention or federal reporting data under FERPA and IDEA).

Technical Skills & Expected Level of Proficiency

- Agile Methodology - Intermediate
- Algorithms - Intermediate
- Application Programming Interface (API) - Intermediate
- CI/CD - Intermediate
- Cloud Serverless Computing Architecture - Intermediate
- Code Review - Intermediate
- Data Architecture and Design - Intermediate
- Data Structures - Intermediate
- Debugging - Intermediate
- Dev Ops - Intermediate
- JIRA - Intermediate
- New Product Development - Intermediate
- Secure Coding - Intermediate
- Service Orientated Architecture - Intermediate
- Software Design Patterns - Intermediate
- Software Development Life Cycle - Intermediate
- Software Engineering - Intermediate
- Unit Testing - Intermediate

The core technical skills listed are most essential; additional technical skills may be required based on specific division or department needs.

Classified Title: Software Engineer 
Job Posting Title (Working Title): Software Engineer - AI Focus (Center for Technology in Education)   
Role/Level/Range: ATP/04/PE  
Starting Salary Range: $38.53 - $67.44 HRLY ($52.00 targeted; Commensurate w/exp.) 
Employee group: Casual / On Call 
Schedule: Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 4:30 pm 
FLSA Status: Exempt 
Location: Remote 
Department name: Center for Technology in Education (CTE)  
Personnel area: School of Education