Research Engineer, Asta

Who You Are:

Are you passionate about AI and its potential to help accelerate science?

Ai2's Asta Project (https://allenai.org/asta) 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.

We are looking for a talented and motivated Research Engineer, ready to take on a complex challenge with huge potential impact for the future of AI, in particular, with skills and interest in the following focus areas:

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

Who We Are:

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 (https://github.com/allenai) and maintained. We regularly publish and present at high-profile journal/conferences in ML, NLP, HCI, and Accessibility.

See links below for examples of our work.

• https://allenai.org/asta
• https://allenai.org/blog/autodiscovery
• https://allenai.org/papers

Your Next Challenge:

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.

What You'll Need:

• 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:

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. Similarly, through weekly Ai2 Academy lectures, 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 even have kayaks for you to paddle right outside our front door. 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 a reasonable accommodation pursuant to the ADA, you are encouraged to contact us at recruiting@allenai.org.

Benefits:

• Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program.
• Team members are able to enroll in our health savings account plan, our healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and our health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
• Team members are able to enroll in our company's 401k plan.
• Team members will receive $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses and will also receive $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.
• Team members will also receive 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.
• Team members will be able to receive annual bonuses and can participate in the long-term incentive plan.

Note: This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the team members(s) of this position. Team members will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. All duties and responsibilities are essential functions and requirements and are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. To perform this job successfully, the team member(s) will possess the skills, aptitudes, and abilities to perform each duty proficiently. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health or safety of themselves or others. The requirements listed in this document are the minimum levels of knowledge, skills, or abilities. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an at will relationship.