What the work actually involves

This is a delivery role, not an advisory one. You sit with a customer — frequently federal, defense, or other mission-critical organizations — hear a vaguely described operational pain point, and leave with enough understanding to design and build something that works. One engagement might be a REST integration feeding an ETL pipeline that lands Parquet and JSON data products. The next might be an LLM agent that reasons across enterprise systems via tool calling, or a RAG pipeline over a mix of structured and unstructured records. You own it from discovery through production adoption, including the unglamorous parts: testing, CI/CD, monitoring, auth, and documentation.

The GenAI half of the job is not prompt tinkering. The listing asks specifically for agentic workflows, structured outputs, multi-step orchestration, and — notably — evaluation frameworks and feedback loops that measure whether the AI application is actually good. If you have built eval harnesses or human-in-the-loop review flows for an LLM system you shipped, that is a differentiator here, not a footnote.

What the screen looks for

Turing's screening process for forward-deployed roles tends to probe three things in sequence: verifiable engineering depth (Python, APIs, data modeling, pipelines), GenAI systems you personally built rather than observed, and judgment under ambiguity — how you decide what to build when the requirement is incomplete and the customer is senior enough to be impatient. Expect follow-ups that push past your first answer. Naming a framework is worth little; describing the schema mapping you got wrong and how you found out is worth a lot.

Logistics, honestly

  • Not remote. Hybrid, with 2–3 days per week in the office or at customer sites in the DC metro area.
  • Full-time employment, not project or hourly contract work.
  • U.S. citizenship is required and is a hard gate given the customer base.
  • Pay is undisclosed on the listing; compensation for FDE roles in this market varies widely with clearance history and seniority, and should be confirmed directly with the recruiter.
  • Federal, defense, or intelligence-community delivery experience is listed as nice-to-have, but in practice it shapes how quickly you become useful.