Senior Research Engineer, OLMo: The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) is 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, Molmo). They unite scientific and engineering minds to explore the potential of truly open AI, empowering academics, researchers, and AI developers to advance language models and generative AI models. Their team engages in a broad range of AI research, including pre-training and post-training language models, curating data, and developing novel methodologies. They study and evaluate AI models theoretically and empirically, aiming to advance their capabilities and create impactful real-world applications like scientific synthesis, with a goal to develop state-of-the-art models excelling in scientific discovery, reasoning, and factual recall. Ai2 is a learning organization, values diversity and inclusion, emphasizes work/life balance, is collaborative and transparent, and is located in Seattle.

Responsibility:
As a Senior Research Engineer, OLMo, you will be part of the core team working on the infrastructure, architecture, modeling, and training of OLMo (Open Language Model) at all stages: pre-training, mid-training, post-training, and emerging paradigms. Your responsibilities include:

Owning the design and implementation of systems that train these models.

Building scalable machine learning pipelines for large language modeling research.

Collaborating with colleagues inside and outside your team.

Being responsible for a feature or experiment from conception to implementation.

Building infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of LLM research.

Optimizing training and inference for language models.

Triaging between experiments and executing on the most impactful ones.

Supporting and collaborating with an open-source community.

Bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and widely adopted products.

Bringing software engineering best practices to a research environment.

Releasing contributions back to the broader community in the form of open-source software, model releases, additions to Ai2’s public API and open research datasets, and technical reports.

Requirements:

Experience: 4+ years of industry experience building ML infrastructure that handles data preprocessing/transformation and model training, evaluation, inference, and deployment. Deep experience in the complete model development cycle.

Technical Skills: Deep knowledge of Python, infrastructure, modern deep learning, natural language processing, language models, and the inner workings of the transformer architecture. Hands-on programming experience with Python and PyTorch/Jax/Tensorflow. Ability to pick up new programming languages, libraries, or APIs quickly. Familiarity with cloud compute resources (e.g., AWS) and containerization (e.g., Docker).

Soft Skills: Thrives in a fast-paced environment, self-directed, team player, strong collaboration and communication skills. Ability to translate high-level goals into concrete research and implementation steps, set an approach, follow through, and present results. Clarity in explaining complex technical issues.

Education: BS or MSc in Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.

Bonus Qualifications: Advanced degree in Data Science/CS/EE/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). Experience successfully operating models at scale in a production setting. Experience in HPC settings. Curiosity about AI research.

Benefits:

Medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, and an employee assistance program.

Voluntary life insurance, voluntary accidental death and dismemberment program, health savings account plan, healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.

Company’s 401k plan.

$125 per month for commuting or internet expenses.

$200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses.

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 per calendar year.

Annual bonuses and participation in the long-term incentive plan.