AI-Powered Funding Opportunity Platform Developer

Summary

We are building an Innovation Funding Portal to help startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs identify public and private funding opportunities. The portal will use a combination of APIs, web scraping, and AI technologies—including natural language processing—to extract and classify funding data from 20–30 sources (federal, state, and foundation websites). We are looking for an experienced AI & Backend Engineer to lead the data extraction, classification, and backend development effort.

Key Responsibilities
Data Extraction & Integration
- Design and implement scalable web scraping pipelines for websites that do not offer APIs
- Integrate with available APIs for structured funding data sources
- Ensure efficient and legally compliant data collection from 20–30 targeted sites

AI/NLP Development
- Develop and fine-tune an AI engine (LLM or other) to extract, interpret, and classify unstructured funding opportunity text
- Map extracted content to structured database fields (e.g., eligibility, deadline, amount, sponsor type)
- Improve model accuracy over time with feedback and tagging

Database & Backend Architecture
- Design and deploy a robust and secure backend database to store funding opportunities and metadata
- Build APIs to enable data retrieval and interaction with the frontend web portal
- Ensure scalability and easy maintenance for continuous data updates

Collaboration with Web Team
- Work closely with frontend developers to ensure seamless data delivery and display on the user interface
- Support automation of alerts, subscriptions, and custom views for different users

Conversational Interface Integration
- Implement a GPT-style chat interface that helps users search the database through natural language queries
- Train or fine-tune models to ensure relevance and accuracy in responses

Qualifications
- Strong experience with Python (including frameworks like Scrapy, FastAPI, Flask, etc.)
- Experience with web scraping, API integration, and automated data pipelines
- Proficiency in working with LLMs, NLP techniques, and open-source AI tools (e.g., LangChain, spaCy, HuggingFace)
- Skilled in database design and management (e.g., PostgreSQL, MongoDB)
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and deploying scalable backend services
- Familiarity with chatbot frameworks and embedding-based search is a strong plus
- Ability to work cross-functionally with designers and frontend developers
- Excellent documentation and communication skills