Senior Software Engineer, Agent Frameworks

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 $146,880 - $220,320, 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 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.

Who We Are:

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.

Your Next Challenge:

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

Design and build the frameworks, SDKs, and execution surfaces that define how agents, tools, and services interact across our research platform

Build infrastructure for sandboxed agent execution, enabling researchers to safely run, inspect, and iterate on agent workflows at scale

Design and maintain evaluation and benchmarking frameworks that measure the performance of individual agent components and end-to-end systems

Develop the abstractions and developer-facing tooling that let research scientists build, compose, and deploy agents without owning the underlying infrastructure

Drive continuous improvements in reliability, observability, and cost-efficiency across the systems agents run in and depend on

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 designing SDKs, APIs, or frameworks that other engineers built on top of and adopted

Hands-on experience building or operating agentic systems – agent orchestration, tool integration, sandboxed execution, memory management, or the surfaces agents run in and consume

Experience designing evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure that measures system or component performance

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar), containerization, and deployment automation

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.

A Little More About Ai2:

Ai2 is a Seattle based non-profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Our mission is building breakthrough AI to solve the world’s biggest problems. We develop foundational AI research and innovation to deliver real-world impact through large-scale open models, data, robotics, conservation, and beyond.

In addition to Ai2’s core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:

We are a learning organization – because everything Ai2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. With a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, Ai2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning alongside your coworkers.

We value diversity - We seek to hire, support, and promote people from all genders, ethnicities, and all levels of experience regardless of age. We particularly encourage applications from women, non-binary individuals, people of color, members of the LGBTQA+ community, and people with disabilities of any kind.

We value inclusion - We understand the value that people's individual experiences and perspectives can bring to an organization, and we are building a culture in which all voices are heard, respected and considered.

We emphasize a healthy work/life balance – we believe our team members are happiest and most productive when their work/life balance is optimized. While we value powerful research results which drive our mission forward, we also value dinner with family, weekend time, and vacation time. We offer generous paid vacation and sick leave as well as family leave.

We are collaborative and transparent – we consider ourselves a team, all moving with a common purpose. We are quick to cheer our successes, and even quicker to share and jointly problem solve our failures.

We are in Seattle – and our office is on the water! We have mountains, we have lakes, we have four seasons, we bike to work, we have a vibrant theater scene, and we have so much else. We welcome interest from applicants from outside of the United States.

We are friendly – chances are you will like every one of the 200+ (and growing) people who work here. We do.

Ai2 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view the related Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision by clicking on their corresponding links.

This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. If E-Verify cannot confirm that you are authorized to work, this employer is required to give you written instructions and an opportunity to contact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Social Security Administration (SSA) so you can begin to resolve the issue before the employer can take any action against you, including terminating your employment. Employers can only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants with disabilities to the full extent required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you feel you need