Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure

Hybrid: Individuals in this role are expected to live in the Greater Seattle area and are encouraged to spend 1-3 days per week on-site in our Seattle offices.

Compensation Range: $140,230 - $213,150

Who We Are

We're software engineers redefining how researchers and engineers use state of the art GPU clusters. We own and actively develop Beaker, a GPU-first job orchestration system used by Ai2 researchers to manage and execute frontier research workloads, such as large-scale, distributed pretraining and online reinforcement learning. We're also responsible for Ai2's on-premise GPU servers from the bare-metal up, operating a high performance storage cluster and designing and developing critical systems that teams across the institute rely on for pushing forward cutting-edge, open science.

Who You Are

You're a talented, self-directed software engineer and operator who thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced environment. You're someone who can quickly and effortlessly produce code to solve a problem, but are also capable of articulating a bigger vision and driving consensus. You're someone who is ready to work across the entire stack, from bare metal to the application layer - though we don't expect you to be an expert in everything. You lead by example and lift up the team; setting an ambitious bar in a balanced, healthy fashion.

Your Next Challenge

You'll be responsible for developing and designing systems that make it effortless for Ai2's researchers and engineers to run large scale, state of the art GPU workloads. You'll work closely with those stakeholders to understand the friction in existing solutions and opportunities for new capabilities. Your work will contribute to the evolution of a platform purpose built for AI research. This infrastructure directly supports the institute's frontier AI efforts, such as: online reinforcement learning, distributed pre-training on large clusters, and PB-scale dataset curation and synthesis.

As a senior individual contributor you'll be expected to work independently on problems both big and small. You'll wrangle large, ambiguous projects, but also won't hesitate to contribute smaller, incremental changes to push forward things you're not directly responsible for. You'll be expected to act as a leader and mentor, promoting a healthy culture and accelerating the growth of your peers.

Your responsibilities will include:

1. Designing critical systems that solve emerging requirements of cutting-edge research projects while partnering closely with stakeholders
2. Delivering software changes, from inception to release
3. Contributing to Beaker, our custom job orchestrator written in Go
4. Operating a fleet of state of the art GPU servers and supporting infrastructure (storage, networking, etc)
5. Reviewing code and design documents; mentoring team members
6. Participating in our weekly on-call cycle, during operating hours (9 AM to 5 PM, PT)
7. Contributing to long term vision for revolutionizing GPU-first computation
8. Participating in planning exercises; proactively contributing to their improvement (we're process light, but there's always room for making things better)
9. Fostering a healthy, high-performance engineering culture

What You'll Need:

1. 6+ years developing highly available software in a professional setting
2. Proficiency in Golang, Python, SQL, shell scripting and linux server administration
3. A strong understanding of running containerized workloads (Docker)
4. Experience debugging live systems
5. Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS)
6. Excellent writing and collaboration skills

Bonus Qualifications:

1. Experience operating GPU clusters or developing distributed ML workloads
2. Deep systems administration expertise
3. Familiarity with Kubernetes
4. Prior experience serving AI models (inference)

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.

1. Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time.
2. The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations.
3. The ability to observe details at close range.
4. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

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.

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

Benefits:

1. Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, and an employee assistance program.
2. Team members are able to enroll in our voluntary life insurance program, our voluntary accidental death and dismemberment program, our health savings account plan, our healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and our health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans.
3. Team members are able to enroll in our company's 401k plan.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.