Senior Software Engineer, Platform

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 $126,000 - $189,000, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

Who You Are:

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to build the foundational architecture behind AI research agents that explore and reason over scholarly literature. You'll design the systems that define how agents, tools, and services interact, creating SDKs, APIs, and execution frameworks that enable researchers to build, evaluate, and scale intelligent systems. You'll contribute to the agent architecture, build infrastructure for sandboxed execution and benchmarking, and create evaluation frameworks that measure component performance. You're a seasoned engineer who thrives in greenfield environments, excels at building robust developer-facing infrastructure, and is energized by making complex distributed systems feel simple.

Your Next Challenge:

The essential functions include, but are not limited to the following:

• Design and extend APIs that expose structured scholarly data to academic researchers and AI agent workflows
• Contribute to dashboards and tools for evaluating data quality and model precision
• 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
• 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
• Collaborate across engineering and research teams to ensure maintainability, test coverage, and robust deployment
• Communicate effectively across engineering, product, and research teams to align priorities and drive projects to completion

What You'll Need:

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education
• Strong Python engineering skills, with experience building production services and developer-facing tools
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar), containerization, and deployment automation
• Solid understanding of integrating AI-powered capabilities into applications, including agent workflows, memory management, and external tool integrations
• Experience with analytics and observability tools like Datadog or similar for monitoring performance, system health, and reliability
• Familiarity with designing APIs, SDKs, or frameworks that other engineers build on top of
• 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.

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.