America First Policy Institute

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Overall Responsibility:

This position will serve as a key member of AFPI's Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis (OFRA) team. The Research Engineer will work directly with senior members of OFRA to deliver tools and analyses that answer policy questions for policymakers in various fields. The position combines quantitative policy research and software engineering, with substantial use of agentic AI, to develop and deploy solutions end to end. This position would be a good fit for those passionate about applying quantitative skills and software tooling to important policy challenges.

Department: Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis

Reports to: Research Senior Advisor of OFRA

Responsibilities and Duties:

- Develop and maintain quantitative analyses (including econometric, statistical, and machine learning models) to support OFRA's policy research and address policy questions across fiscal, regulatory, government efficiency, and other areas;

- Develop and deploy the software that wraps the analyses, including server applications, APIs, MCPs, frontends, and the cloud infrastructure they run on;

- Manage AI agents to iterate on these tools at scale;

- Communicate with users to fix issues and develop new features;

- Contribute to OFRA's shared capability portfolio;

- Mentor junior OFRA staff;

- Clearly champion AFPI's servant leadership culture;

- Operate with discretion in an environment that requires information security.

Consults with:

- The rest of the OFRA team;

- Other economic and technical teams at AFPI;

- Support staff;

- Interns.

Type of Employment: Full-time

Qualifications:

- A postgraduate degree in a quantitative field is a plus;

- Deep expertise in one or more of econometrics, statistics, simulations, machine learning, and deep learning is a plus;

- Strong programming ability in common programming languages;

- Experience with team-based software development and principles;

- Familiarity with managing resources on at least one major cloud platform;

- Familiarity with frontier AI models, and experience managing AI agents to accomplish substantive engineering tasks at scale;

- Experience taking projects end to end, from problem framing through deployed tooling;

- An interest in or experience with interdisciplinary research is a plus;

- A deep quantitative integrity and respect for the scientific process;

- Excellent attention to detail and communication skills (both oral and written);

- Ability to maintain productive, collaborative, and collegial relationships with staff and external stakeholders and uphold the public reputation of the organization;

- An entrepreneurial mindset that seeks out new opportunities to grow and advance the mission of AFPI.

- Salaries for positions will be commensurate with the experience, expertise, and skills of the individual.

- Please send a cover letter, resume, salary requirement, writing samples, and references.

AFPI is a non-profit, non-partisan research institute offering competitive salaries and benefits to qualified candidates.