Senior Software Development Engineer III - Agentic AI & LLM Applications (#26-073) in Arlington, Virginia at Strategic Analysis, Inc.

Strategic Analysis, Inc. (SA) Is seeking a Software Engineer to support the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)


Overview:

The GRACE team at ARPA-H is building the next generation of agentic AI to transform how the agency accelerates research, makes decisions, and ships products at scale. GRACE is ARPA-H's production AI assistant, and we are evolving it into an ecosystem of autonomous, multi-agent systems. They are a small, startup-minded team that ships fast and owns what we build end-to-end. They are looking for a senior SDE III who lives at the application layer: designing and building the agentic workflows, LLM integrations, tool-calling systems, and AI-powered features that GRACE users interact with every day. The focus is on what runs on top of the platform: the agents, the orchestration, the prompts, the pipelines, and the product.
The best person for this role starts with the user. They ask why before they ask how. They communicate clearly, give and receive feedback well, and make the people around them better. They are a self-starter with a high bar, a high sense of urgency, and genuine empathy for the people whose work they are making better.


Responsibilities:

- Agentic AI Systems & Orchestration
- LLM Application Development
- Features & Product
- Observability & Reliability
- Engineering Excellence


Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
• Proven experience in high-velocity environments where you owned and shipped complex products end-to-end
• Strong proficiency in Python and at least one other backend language; familiarity with modern backend frameworks and async patterns
• Solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, APIs, and software design patterns
• Experience building and operating systems on major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with containerization and working within CI/CD pipelines
• Clear, direct communicator who gives and receives feedback well, works with empathy, and makes the people around them better
• Self-starter with a high bar and high sense of urgency; you do not wait to be told what to do next


Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience building production systems on top of LLMs: tool-calling, RAG, multi-step reasoning, and context management
• Experience with multi-agent (A2A) architectures and orchestration frameworks in production, not just in prototypes
• Familiarity with MCP at the client/consumer layer: how agents discover and invoke tools via MCP
• Strong intuition for prompt engineering and LLM behavior across model families; you know why Claude and GPT respond differently to the same prompt and you design for it
• Experience building LLM evaluation and regression testing pipelines
• Demonstrated understanding of token economics: cost-per-query awareness, context budget management, and prompt efficiency
• Track record in startup or early-stage environments: 0-to-1 product building, comfort with ambiguity, high sense of urgency
• Experience in big tech building customer-facing AI platforms or developer tools at scale
• Background in security-conscious engineering: input validation, output sanitization, audit logging, and responsible AI guardrails
• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated domains is a plus but not required


Education: Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Location: Remote with occasional travel
Clearance: Ability to obtain HHS Public Trust.