Senior Software Engineer, Agent Frameworks

About the role

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is hiring a Senior Engineer to build the foundational architecture behind AI research agents that explore and reason over scholarly literature. You'll design the systems that define how agents, tools, and services interact, creating SDKs, APIs, and execution frameworks that enable researchers to build, evaluate, and scale intelligent systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the frameworks, SDKs, and execution surfaces that define how agents, tools, and services interact across our research platform
• Build infrastructure for sandboxed agent execution, enabling researchers to safely run, inspect, and iterate on agent workflows at scale
• Design and maintain evaluation and benchmarking frameworks that measure the performance of individual agent components and end-to-end systems
• Develop the abstractions and developer-facing tooling that let research scientists build, compose, and deploy agents without owning the underlying infrastructure
• Drive continuous improvements in reliability, observability, and cost-efficiency across the systems agents run in and depend on
• Engage in the entire software development lifecycle, from ideation and design to implementation and testing to deployment and operational support, with a strong sense of ownership for results
• Collaborate across engineering and research teams to ensure maintainability, test coverage, and robust deployment
• Communicate effectively across engineering, product, and research teams to align priorities and drive projects to completion

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education
• Strong Python engineering skills, with experience building production services and developer-facing tools
• Experience designing SDKs, APIs, or frameworks that other engineers built on top of and adopted
• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic systems – agent orchestration, tool integration, sandboxed execution, memory management, or the surfaces agents run in and consume
• Experience designing evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure that measures system or component performance
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar), containerization, and deployment automation
• Strong communication skills and a sense of ownership for results

Qualifications

• 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

Skills

• Python engineering skills
• Experience with SDKs, APIs, or frameworks
• Experience with agentic systems
• Experience with cloud infrastructure
• Communication skills

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and an employee assistance program
• Health savings account plan, healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans
• 401k plan
• $125 per month for commuting or internet expenses, $200 per month for fitness and wellbeing expenses
• Sick days, personal days, vacation days, and paid holidays
• Annual bonuses and participation in the long-term incentive plan

Pay

Base salary range: $126,000 - $189,000

Schedule

On-site requirements vary based on position and team.