You are a seasoned full-stack engineer who thrives in greenfield environments where you have broad scope and the opportunity to wear multiple hats. You excel in building impactful, AI-powered solutions and take pride in delivering intuitive, high-performance user experiences. In this role, you'll work closely with UX designers, AI/ML experts, and research scientists, both internally and at partner institutions, to create seamless interfaces that empower users to interact effectively with our AI systems. You're energized by the opportunity to collaborate directly with researchers to translate their needs into production applications that advance real scientific discovery.
Who We Are:
The Agentic Applications team builds open, production-grade AI systems that power scientific discovery. We focus on developing intelligent agents that help researchers explore literature, synthesize knowledge, and accelerate their work across real-world scientific use cases. The team combines strong engineering practices with close collaboration across Ai2's product and research orgs to deliver tools used by millions of researchers and developers worldwide.
Your Next Challenge:
The essential functions include, but are not limited to the following:
- Work closely with UX designers, product managers, and research scientists to develop rich UI experiences using React and robust backend services in Python
- Engage in the entire software development lifecycle, from ideation and design to implementation and testing to deployment and operational support, with a strong sense of ownership for results
- Scale our systems in a cost-effective and sustainable manner and be a driving force behind continuous improvements in reliability and automation
- Improve team velocity through contributions to software design, feature development, platform and framework enhancements, capacity planning, and deployment tooling
- Help set and maintain best practices in how we measure, monitor, and respond to system availability, latency, and general application health
- Communicate effectively across engineering, product, and research teams to align priorities and drive projects to completion
- Mentor less-senior engineers on the team in both technical and non-technical skills
What You’ll Need:
- Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education
- Professional experience with web development using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- Strong Python engineering skills
- Proficiency with front-end frameworks such as React
- Experience with AWS, Google Cloud, or similar cloud platforms
- Experience with analytics and observability tools like Heap, Datadog, or similar for monitoring performance, system health, and user interactions
- Solid understanding of integrating AI-powered capabilities into applications, including prompt engineering, memory management, agent workflows, and external tool integrations
- Strong communication skills and a sense of ownership for results
Physical Demands and Work Environment:
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.
- Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.
- The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.
- The ability to observe details at close range.
- Can work under deadlines.
A Little More About Ai2:
Ai2 is a Seattle based non-profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Our mission is building breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems. We develop foundational AI research and innovation to deliver real-world impact through large-scale open models, data, robotics, conservation, and beyond.
In addition to Ai2’s core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:
- We are a learning organization – because everything Ai2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. Similarly, through weekly Ai2 Academy lectures, a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, Ai2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning alongside your coworkers.
- We value diversity - We seek to hire, support, and promote people from all genders, ethnicities, and all levels of experience regardless of age. We particularly encourage applications from women, non-binary individuals, people of color, members of the LGBTQA+ community, and people with disabilities of any kind.
- We value inclusion - We understand the value that people's individual experiences and perspectives can bring to an organization, and we are building a culture in which all voices are heard, respected and considered.
- We emphasize a healthy work/life balance – we believe our team members are happiest and most productive when their work/life balance is optimized. While we value powerful research results which drive our mission forward, we also value dinner with family, weekend time, and vacation time. We offer generous paid vacation and sick leave as well as family leave.
- We are collaborative and transparent – we consider ourselves a team, all moving with a common purpose. We are quick to cheer our successes, and even quicker to share and jointly problem solve our failures.
- We are in Seattle – and our office is on the water! We have mountains, we have lakes, we have four seasons, we bike to work, we have a vibrant theater scene, and we have so much else. We even have kayaks for you to paddle right outside our front door. We welcome interest from applicants from outside of the United States.
- We are friendly– chances are you will like every one of the 200+ (and growing) people who work here. We do.
Ai2 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view the related Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision by clicking on their corresponding links.
This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. If E-Verify cannot confirm that you are authorized to work, this employer is required to give you written instructions and an opportunity to contact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Social Security Administration (SSA) so you can begin to resolve the issue before the employer can take any action against you, including terminating your employment. Employers can only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants with disabilities to the full extent required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you feel you need a reasonable accommodation pursuant to the ADA, you are encouraged to contact us at recruiting@allenai.org.
Benefits:
- Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program.
- Team members are able to enroll in our health savings account plan, our healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and our health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
- Team members are able to enroll in our company’s 401k plan.
- Team members will receive $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses and will also receive $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
- Team members will also receive up to ten sick days per year, up to seven personal days per year, up to 20 vacation days per year and twelve paid holidays throughout the calendar year.
- Team members will be able to receive annual bonuses and can participate in the long-term incentive plan.
Note: This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the team members(s) of this position. Team members will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. All duties and responsibilities are essential functions and requirements and are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. To perform this job successfully, the team member(s) will possess the skills, aptitudes, and abilities to perform each duty proficiently. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health or safety of themselves or others. The requirements listed in this document are the minimum levels of knowledge, skills, or abilities. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an at will relationship.