Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Government technology has failed citizens, veterans, public servants, and service members for decades.

Kaizen powers America’s application layer. We replace the legacy systems federal agencies run on with modern software, built with craft. The ticketing platform a resident uses to visit a presidential library. The marketplace DoW uses to procure counter-drone systems to protect lives and critical infrastructure. The system a Veteran uses to access benefits. We build systems of record, of national consequence. Our AI-native modules and harness allow us to do so in weeks, not years.

This year, our revenue has grown 35x. Next year, our software will serve over 100 million Americans across dozens of federal agencies.

Founded in 2022 and based in New York City and DC, Kaizen has raised $35 million from NEA, a16z, Accel, 776, and Carpenter Capital.

THE ROLE

We built an internal tool called Bidbuddy. Before it existed, someone on our team spent eight hours a week scraping procurement sites, pulling RFPs by hand, and reading them to figure out which ones were worth chasing. Now one system does the scraping and the first pass of analysis. Those eight hours went back to the people doing the actual work of winning.

That's one tool. We need many more, and most of them don't exist yet. Kaizen is about 40 people supporting software that reaches 40 million residents across 50+ agencies in 17 states, and the only way that math holds is if the company runs on tools instead of hours.

This role owns that. You'll go department by department, find where the time goes, and build the thing that takes it back. Sometimes that's an internal app. Sometimes it's an automation nobody notices. Sometimes it's teaching a team to use AI properly, which is often the highest leverage thing available. Then you roll it out and stay on it until people actually use it. We already have the list, and it's long.

LOCATION

This is a hybrid role based out of our New York. Candidates must reside in New York or be able to commute to New York City to work out of our office at least four times a week (Monday - Thursday).

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own internal tools end to end, from the hallway conversation that surfaces the problem through architecture, build, rollout, and the week two fixes.

- Build AI powered internal systems in the mold of Bidbuddy: document parsing and analysis, agentic workflows, automated research and routing, and tooling that turns hours of manual work into minutes.

- Work directly with leads across Proposals, Customer Ops, Sales, Design, and Engineering to find where the time is going, and translate half-formed asks into something worth building.

- Drive AI enablement across the company. Every person at Kaizen should know how to get the most out of these tools.

- Support the external analytics layer inside Kaizen's platform, so customers have clear, actionable data at their fingertips