Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI in Washington, District of Columbia at Cato Institute

The Cato Institute seeks qualified candidates for the Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI position. Cato is building two technology platforms in parallel, a React-powered Next.js content platform and a Python research and operations platform, and both need an engineer who can move between them. Features, infrastructure, testing, AI integration: The work goes where the need is.

That cross-platform expectation is practical: Cato’s development environments run on AI agent orchestration with structured reasoning frameworks, automated quality enforcement, and strict type systems that catch mistakes before the engineer does. The role does not require years of experience in both TypeScript and Python. It requires strong engineering fundamentals and comfort working inside an AI-empowered development loop, as well as building and improving the agent skills undergirding it.

The Senior Software Engineer joins a small, technically ambitious team working at the intersection of policy scholarship with modern software engineering and AI-integrated workflows.

The projected salary range for this role is $100,000 - $190,000 per year.
Compensation is based on the successful candidate's educational background, experience, and skills.

About Cato

The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank — dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues.

Founded in 1977, Cato owes its name to Cato’s Letters, a series of essays published in 18th-century England that presented a vision of a society free from excessive government power. Those essays inspired the architects of the American Revolution. And the simple, timeless principles of that revolution — individual liberty, limited government, and free markets — turn out to be even more powerful in today’s world of global markets and unprecedented access to information than Jefferson or Madison could have imagined. Social and economic freedom is not just the best policy for a free people, it is the indispensable framework for the future.

Cato Institute is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain sophisticated agent skills and agentic tooling that integrate AI across engineering and operational workflows
• Integrate AI content retrieval systems, such as Sanity’s Agent Context, into production workflows
• Build services (e.g., API and MCP endpoints) that surface Cato’s 50 years of policy research for diverse consuming applications
• Build and extend features, components, and shared packages across both the TypeScript / React content platform and the Python research and operations platform
• Extend and harden core infrastructure packages across both platforms: API client integration, streaming data pipelines, document processing, and structured logging
• Maintain testing infrastructure across both platforms, closing coverage gaps and integrating tests into continuous integration workflows

Likely Initial Focus Areas (First 6 - 12 Months)

• Contribute to the content platform’s march toward production, picking up feature work, migration tasks, and building pipeline improvements
• Develop familiarity with both codebases through Cato’s AI development infrastructure — project instruction files, quality enforcement hooks, and structured reasoning frameworks that provide persistent architectural context and catch errors in real time
• Build out test suites for both platforms, prioritizing high-dependency packages and critical paths

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in any field
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including work on production systems
• Expertise with multiple major LLMs: Claude, ChatGPT, and/or Gemini
• Expertise with agentic AI development tools (Claude Code, Codex, or similar), including authoring reusable agent capabilities — agent skills, structured workflows, and tool integrations — not just using them
• Proficiency in TypeScript / React or Python, with demonstrated ability to work productively in languages and frameworks outside your primary expertise
• Experience building or integrating LLM-enabled systems — prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, or evaluation pipelines

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: testing, version control, CI/CD, code review, and systems design
• Comfort working across the stack — backend services, frontend components, data pipelines, and build infrastructure
• Clear written and verbal communication; ability to document systems and explain technical decisions to non-engineers
• Self-directed, adaptable, and comfortable with ambiguity in a small team where priorities shift
• Familiarity with Cato’s work or demonstrated interest in public policy

• Familiarity with headless CMS platforms, content modeling, or structured content systems
• Experience building streaming or pipeline-based data processing systems
• Experience with AI output evaluation frameworks or quality benchmarking tools
• Experience authoring and maintaining agent skills (such as Claude/Claude Code Skills) or comparable agentic workflow packages
• Familiarity with think tank, research, government, or academic technology environments

Benefits

All Cato employees are provided:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Employer contribution to a Health Savings Account (HSA)
• Generous vacation and sick days
• Paid parental leave
• Employer-provided life and disability insurance
• 401(k) employer match
• Transit/Parking benefits
• Pet discount plan

To Apply

Please submit the following materials:

• Resume or CV
• A cover letter making the case, to yourself as much as to us, for why this particular job at this particular organization. Go beyond ATS-focused keyword slop and get real.
• Optional: links to code repositories, personal projects, or technical writing

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. This position does not offer visa sponsorship.