Senior Research Engineer, Olmo + Molmo

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:

To thrive as a Research Engineer at Ai2, you'll bring a blend of deep technical expertise and a collaborative, self-directed mindset. You have extensive experience with deep learning and/or foundation models — whether through a PhD in ML or equivalent hands‑on industry work. You're a curious, agile engineer who can generate ideas, design experiments, and implement them in Python against real AI systems.

You communicate research insights clearly to technical stakeholders, and you're energized by working with strong contributors toward shared, ambitious goals.

As a Research Engineer on the team, you'll be a core member responsible for training Ai2's flagship open models (e.g. Olmo, Molmo, and beyond). From system design to experiment release, you'll own end-to-end delivery while collaborating closely with research and engineering colleagues to push the boundaries of open model research.

• Building and optimizing infrastructure for LLM, multimodal, and agentic research — including training/inference pipelines, dataset curation, and large‑scale preprocessing
• Designing, training, and evaluating multimodal models (vision + language) and agentic workflows, including tool use, planning, and long-horizon tasks
• Scoping and leading research projects, prioritizing experiments for highest impact
• Bringing strong software engineering practices to a research environment and bridging cutting‑edge work to production‑quality products
• Contributing to and supporting the open-source community through model releases, datasets, public APIs, and technical reports

• 4+ years of ML infrastructure experience — data preprocessing, model training, evaluation, inference, and deployment
• Experience with end-to-end model development — dataset construction, training, fine-tuning, evaluation, profiling, and monitoring
• Familiarity with modern model architectures — including LLMs (MoEs, long-context models), vision‑language models (e.g., Molmo, LLaVA), and experience training and evaluating both
• Agentic systems knowledge — tools, memory, and long-running workflows
• Strong software engineering fundamentals — performant, scalable systems and confident debugging
• Proficiency in Python and a major ML framework (PyTorch, JAX, or Tensor Flow), with the flexibility to pick up new tools as needed
• Familiarity with cloud and containerization (e.g., GCP, AWS, Docker)
• Strong communication and collaboration skills — we're a small, close-knit team and work best when everyone's pulling in the same direction

• BS or MSc in Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent experience)
• A minimum of 2 years of software development experience. (or equivalent experience)

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.

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.…