Senior Software Engineer, Agent Platform (AI for the Planet)

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. 

We are a small engineering team at the Allen Institute for AI, part of AI for the Planet. Our organization works on maritime conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions with some of the most impactful organizations on the planet. This team focuses on how we build, ship, and run agentic tools across multiple programs. We work through infrastructure, security, evaluation, user-interfaces, and monitoring for workflows that are highly non-deterministic, and we form product opinions about a field that is still taking shape.  

Today, our team supports a few applications:

We are building a platform for conservation groups, government agencies, and research organizations that want to run AI agents against their own systems. They know their domain and they have the data. We give them the tools to build an agent, see what it is doing, and tell whether it is any good.

You would work across the whole platform, from core services to the tools, UI and API interfaces, docs, and evals authors use, and help decide what those should become as the field changes. You would also build and run agents of your own, so you know the platform as a user.

Much of the job is spent with partners: meeting their developers, sometimes on site, seeing where they get stuck, and turning recurring problems into platform improvements. We expect you to form opinions about what to build, argue for them, and change them when users show you otherwise.

• Build and evolve the platform's core capabilities and interfaces.
• Own the experience of authoring agents on the platform, from the first build all the way through production deployment.
• Build the UI, CLI, and SDK that authors use to deploy agents, run evals, and understand what happened.
• Develop our own internal agents on the platform and operate them in production.
• Write the docs, quickstarts, and example agents that get an outside developer from an idea to a running agent.
• Decide with the team what to work on next, and fix what blocks users before starting larger features.
• Write small tools and skills that make the team faster.

You would work closely with our PM team on what to build next, and with the other engineers on the platform.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience across the stack: web UIs, backend services, CLIs, and cloud tooling. You move between them as the work needs.
• A track record of shipping products to external users and talking with those users directly.
• Good judgment about priorities: you fix blockers first and keep scope small.
• Clean, tested code, and experience reviewing other people's code.
• Opinions about API design, and a preference for simple designs over clever ones.
• Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, including writing your own skills or tools.
• Willingness to write documentation as part of the work rather than after it.
• Clear technical communication with engineers and non-engineers.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building developer tools, CLIs, SDKs, or public APIs for outside users.
• Experience building or running LLM agents, including prompts, tools, and evals.
• Experience building evaluation or experimentation systems.
• Small or growth-stage company experience.
• Public technical work such as open source contributions, writing, or side projects.
• Willingness to travel on occasion.

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 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.