Senior Software Engineer, Platform

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 $126,000 - $189,000, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

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.

• 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

• 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

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.

Ai2 is a Seattle based non‑profit AI research institute founded in 2014 by the late Paul Allen. Our…