Research Engineer, Asta

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

$118K — $178K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/Data Science/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP or related field, or equivalent experience.
  • 2+ years building agentic infrastructure handling tools and skills.
  • 2+ years in data preprocessing and ML model training, evaluation, and deployment.
  • Knowledge of deep learning, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning.
  • Strong software engineering skills focusing on performance and debugging.
  • Experience with Python and ML frameworks like PyTorch/Jax/TensorFlow.
  • Familiarity with cloud computing and containerization.

Responsibilities

  • Build infrastructure for next-gen LLM and agentic research.
  • Create AI tools for scientific discovery across various domains.
  • Design, build, and train machine learning models for agentic workflows.
  • Bridge cutting-edge research with widely adopted products.
  • Implement software engineering best practices in research environments.
  • Support collaboration with the open-source community.
  • Release contributions for open-source software and research datasets.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, vision, and employee assistance coverage for team members and families.
  • Options to enroll in health savings, reimbursement accounts, and flexible spending plans.
  • Ability to enroll in the company's 401k plan.
  • Monthly allowances for commuting/internet and fitness/wellbeing.
  • Generous leave policy including sick, personal, vacation, and paid holidays.
  • Eligible for annual bonuses and participation in long-term incentive plans.
Full Job Description
Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle. On-site requirements vary based on position and team. If you have questions about on-site work arrangements for this role, please ask your recruiter.
Our base salary range is $118,800 - $178,200, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

Who You Are:

Are you passionate about AI and its potential to help accelerate science?

Ai2's Asta Project (https://allenai.org/asta) aims to rapidly advance science, developing solutions in the areas of AI research assistants for scientists, literature understanding and synthesis, end-to-end discovery, human-AI interaction and intelligent interfaces, data-driven discovery, agents that can learn over time, methods for training agentic models, and the evaluation and benchmarking of agents.

We are looking for a talented and motivated Research Engineer, ready to take on a complex challenge with huge potential impact for the future of AI, in particular, with skills and interest in the following focus areas:
  1. Automated and AI-assisted scientific discovery.
  2. Agentic planning, reasoning, learning, and evaluation.
  3. Data-driven discovery.
  4. Literature-driven ideation and discovery.
  5. Human-Agent Collaboration: Proactivity, Long-running agent, Memory, and context management.
  6. Continual learning, representation, and reasoning.
  7. Post-training, model tuning, distillation, and specialization.

Your Next Challenge:

The essential functions include, but are not limited to, the following:
  • Building infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of LLM and agentic research.
  • Creating AI tools to facilitate scientific discovery in domains such as biology, cancer research, neuroscience, social science, etc.
  • Designing, building, and training machine learning or language models for agentic workflows.
  • Bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and a widely adopted product.
  • Bringing software engineering best practices to a research environment.
  • Supporting and collaborating with an open-source community.
  • Releasing your contributions back to the broader community in the form of open source software, model releases, and additions to Ai2's public API and open research datasets, as well as technical reports.

What You'll Need:
  • A bachelor's degree in CS/EE/Data Science/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience, and expertise in building ML infrastructure.
  • 2+ years of experience building agentic infrastructure that handles tools, skills, and other artifacts.
  • 2+ years of experience building infrastructure that handles data preprocessing/transformation and machine learning model training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
  • Knowledge of modern deep learning, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning techniques.
  • Strong software engineering skills, particularly around building performant systems and debugging.
  • Must have experience with Python and PyTorch/Jax/Tensorflow, agentic frameworks (e.g., MCP), as well as feel at ease in picking up new programming languages, libraries, or APIs as tools as project needs evolve.
  • Familiarity with cloud compute resources (e.g., GCP, AWS, Modal) and containerization (e.g., Docker).
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills - our environment is small and collaborative, and we'd like you to thrive while working closely with others, sometimes with complementary skills/perspectives.

Bonus qualifications:
  • Advanced degree in CS/EE/Data Science/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP or related fields and/or relevant and equivalent engineering experience.
  • Contributions to open-source ML or research libraries (e.g., spaCy, AllenNLP, transformers, langchain).
  • Experience successfully operating at scale in a production setting.
  • Experience in HPC settings.
  • Curiosity about AI research.

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.

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.

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