Senior Software Engineer, Platform Seattle, WA View job

Role: Senior Software Engineer, Platform
Location: Seattle, WA

Role Overview:
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.

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.

Responsibilities:
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

Requirements and Qualifications:
- 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:
- 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: $126,000 - $189,000, 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 a healthy work/life balance.
- Collaborative and transparent team environment.
- Seattle office location on the water with access to mountains, lakes, and outdoor activities.