Senior Research Engineer, Olmo + Molmo Seattle, WA View job

Role: Senior Research Engineer, Olmo + Molmo
Location: Seattle, WA

Role Overview:
As a Research Engineer on the team, you'll be a core member responsible for training Ai2's flagship open models (e.g. Olmo, Molmo, and beyond). From system design to experiment release, you'll own end-to-end delivery while collaborating closely with research and engineering colleagues to push the boundaries of open model research. To thrive as a Research Engineer at Ai2, you'll bring a blend of deep technical expertise and a collaborative, self-directed mindset. You have extensive experience with deep learning and/or foundation models — whether through a PhD in ML or equivalent hands-on industry work. You're a curious, agile engineer who can generate ideas, design experiments, and implement them in Python against real AI systems. You communicate research insights clearly to technical stakeholders, and you're energized by working with strong contributors toward shared, ambitious goals.

Key Responsibilities:
- Building and optimizing infrastructure for LLM, multimodal, and agentic research — including training/inference pipelines, dataset curation, and large-scale preprocessing
- Designing, training, and evaluating multimodal models (vision + language) and agentic workflows, including tool use, planning, and long-horizon tasks
- Scoping and leading research projects, prioritizing experiments for highest impact
- Bringing strong software engineering practices to a research environment and bridging cutting-edge work to production-quality products
- Contributing to and supporting the open-source community through model releases, datasets, public APIs, and technical reports

Requirements and Qualifications:
- 4+ years of ML infrastructure experience — data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, inference, and deployment
- Experience with end-to-end model development — dataset construction, training, fine-tuning, evaluation, profiling, and monitoring
- Familiarity with modern model architectures — including LLMs (MoEs, long-context models), vision-language models (e.g., Molmo, LLaVA), and experience training and evaluating both
- Agentic systems knowledge — tools, memory, and long-running workflows
- Strong software engineering fundamentals — performant, scalable systems and confident debugging
- Proficiency in Python and a major ML framework (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow), with the flexibility to pick up new tools as needed
- Familiarity with cloud and containerization (e.g., GCP, AWS, Docker)
- Strong communication and collaboration skills — we're a small, close-knit team and work best when everyone's pulling in the same direction
- BS or MSc in Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent experience)
- A minimum of 2 years of software development experience (or equivalent experience)

Physical Demands and Work Environment:
- 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.

What They Offer:
- Base salary range: $146,880 - $220,320, plus generous bonus plans and long-term incentive plan participation.
- Medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program for team members and their families.
- Health savings account plan, healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
- Company 401k plan.
- $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses.
- $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
- 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.
- Annual bonuses.
- Learning organization culture with weekly Ai2 Academy lectures and world-class AI experts as guest speakers.
- Commitment to diversity, inclusion, and healthy work/life balance.
- Office located in Seattle on the water with access to mountains, lakes, and outdoor activities.