Applied AI Engineer

About Us

Clayco is a full-service, turnkey real estate development, master planning, architecture, engineering, and construction firm that safely delivers clients across North America the highest quality solutions on time, on budget, and above and beyond expectations. With $8.1 billion in revenue for 2025, Clayco specializes in the "art and science of building," providing fast track, efficient solutions for mission critical, industrial, life sciences, power & energy, aviation, commercial, institutional, residential and sports & entertainment related building projects.

The Role We Want You For

Across Clayco, people have built their own AI tools to get through the document-heavy parts of their work — reviewing submittals, finding the right procedure, pulling history off a past project. Nobody asked them to. The work is tedious, the tools were available, and no one had given them a better option.

That appetite is both the opportunity and the problem. We run governed agents on a Snowflake semantic layer today, with far more of the work ahead of us than behind. The gap is between what people will build for themselves and what we can actually stand behind.

You will close it. This role builds the AI applications Clayco employees use in their daily work — governed, supported, and good enough that the private versions stop being worth the trouble.

The Specifics of the Role

• Build governed AI applications that make the ad-hoc tools people built for themselves unnecessary
• Build retrieval over our internal knowledge base: procedures, training content, project history, platform documentation
• Turn our domain model into working retrieval boundaries rather than a diagram
• Evaluate model and approach choices against real Clayco work rather than public benchmarks
• Set the prompt and context engineering standards the engineers after you will inherit
• Build inside our agent registry and identity model, not around it

Requirements

• You have shipped this to real users. Retrieval and document intelligence in production, with people depending on it; not a prototype that impressed a steering committee.
• You evaluate honestly. You know whether a system works because you tested it on real tasks and looked at where it failed. If you have ever shipped something you knew was not ready, you know why this matters.
• You can work with the people who do the work. Sitting with a project engineer, watching them review a submittal, and understanding why the obvious automation would be wrong.
• You are comfortable early. This pillar is being built. You will have architectural latitude and fewer people to ask than you would somewhere established.
• Nice to have: construction or AEC background, Snowflake Cortex, n8n, document extraction at scale, experience consolidating shadow tooling into something supported.

Some Things You Should Know

• Our clients and projects are nationwide – Travel will be required.
• No other builder can offer the collaborative design-build approach that Clayco does.
• We work on creative, complex, award-winning, high-profile jobs.
• The pace is fast!
• This position is classified as a safety-sensitive role in accordance with applicable state and federal laws. Candidates selected for this position will be subject to a comprehensive background check, which includes mandatory drug testing.  

Why Clayco?

• 2025 Best Places to Work – St. Louis Business Journal, Los Angeles Business Journal, and Phoenix Business Journal.
• 2025 ENR Top 400 – Top Data Center Contractor (Top 3).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Design-Build Firms – Design-Build Contractor (Top 5).
• 2025 ENR Top 100 Green Contractors – Green Contractor (Top 3).

Benefits

• Discretionary Annual Bonus: Subject to company and individual performance.
• Comprehensive Benefits Package Including: Medical, dental and vision plans, 401k, generous PTO and paid company holidays, employee assistance program, flexible spending accounts, life insurance, disability coverage, learning & development programs and more!

Compensation

• The salary range for this position considers a wide range of factors in making compensation decisions including but not limited to: Education, qualifications, skills, training, experience, certifications, internal equity, and location. Compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.