Research Engineer, FlexOlmo

Person in this Role

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 $128,880 - $193,320, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

Ai2 is seeking a talented and motivated Research Engineer 2 to join the Flex Olmo team
, working on a series of large language models designed for flexible data use
, with a focus on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE),
long-context language models (LCLMs), and retrieval
.

You are a talented, hands‑on engineer who thrives in a fast‑paced environment, is self‑directed, a team player, and knows how to get things done. You have a strong understanding of modern deep learning, natural language processing, language models, and the inner workings of the transformer architecture, especially MoEs. You can translate high‑level goals into concrete research and implementation steps, set an approach, follow through, and present results.

When it’s time to explain your ideas, you bring clarity to complex technical issues. You use these skills to create real‑world benefits for researchers and other practitioners, and you are excited to help advance our effort to create the best‑performing open AI model.

We are a non‑profit AI institute, focused on developing foundational AI research and innovation to deliver real‑world impact through large‑scale open models, data, and artifacts (e.g., OLMo, Tulu, Asta, Olmo Earth). We unite the best and brightest scientific and engineering minds to explore the potential of truly open AI. Through our efforts, we endeavour to empower academics, researchers, and AI developers more broadly to advance language models and generative AI models.

Through close collaboration, we rapidly identify, define, and act on the most exciting and promising new ideas in AI.

The Flex Olmo team designs new architectures and training methods that help models use data more effectively—through improved training, inference‑time conditioning, and retrieval—broadening the types of data they can leverage and ultimately enhancing performance. We also develop scientific methodologies for evaluating and understanding these systems. Our team produces high‑impact research and expertly engineered open‑source tools that accelerate NLP research worldwide. Our first release in July 2025 focused on a new Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture.

Looking ahead, we plan to pursue creative, groundbreaking research that delivers scientific insights and practical solutions for building architectures and training methods that unlock the use of large and diverse data sources.

Why Flex Olmo? We are building the foundation for research into the next generation of language models designed for flexible data use.

• Flex Olmo is a small, tightly knit team, giving you the unique opportunity to work closely with team members towards one high‑impact project.
• We encourage open collaboration on projects, even with researchers at external institutions.
• Our pay is competitive, and visa sponsorship is available.
• We are committed to open science and support freely publishing papers, as exemplified by our first release:
  Flex Olmo:
  Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use.

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

• Building infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of LLM research around flexible data use.
• Optimising training and inference for language models.
• Triaging between experiments and executing on the most impactful.
• 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.

• A bachelor's degree in Data Science/CS/EE/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP,…