Research Engineer, Asta Seattle, WA View job

Role: Research Engineer, Asta
Location: Seattle, WA

Role Overview:
Ai2's Asta Project 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. The Asta Team (Semantic Scholar and Aristo, based in Seattle) at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is an interdisciplinary research and engineering team focused on AI, ML, NLP, and HCI to support our mission of accelerating science with intelligent and interactive research assistants. All of our scientific artifacts (data, model, software, papers) are open-sourced and maintained. We regularly publish and present at high-profile journal/conferences in ML, NLP, HCI, and Accessibility.

Focus Areas:
- Automated and AI-assisted scientific discovery.
- Agentic planning, reasoning, learning, and evaluation.
- Data-driven discovery.
- Literature-driven ideation and discovery.
- Human-Agent Collaboration: Proactivity, Long-running agent, Memory, and context management.
- Continual learning, representation, and reasoning.
- Post-training, model tuning, distillation, and specialization.

Responsibilities:
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.

Requirements and Qualifications:
- 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:
- 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: $118,800 - $178,200, with generous bonus plans.
- Medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program for team members and their families.
- Enrollment in health savings account plan, healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
- Company’s 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 and participation in the long-term incentive plan.
- Learning organization with weekly Ai2 Academy lectures and world-class AI experts as guest speakers.
- Commitment to diversity, inclusion, and healthy work/life balance.
- Collaborative and transparent team culture.
- Office located in Seattle on the water.