Senior Research Engineer

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 $174,240 - $261,360, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package. 

Who You Are:

OlmoEarth is growing - more partners, more use cases, and a platform that is evolving quickly. We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer who can collaborate with our partners to tailor the OlmoEarth models to a wide range of specific applications across multiple domains. 

Who We Are: 

OlmoEarth is an open, end-to-end platform built around a family of foundation models for Earth observation. The platform enables users to create custom fine-tuned models to detect and classify novel geospatial features, handling the full loop: imagery acquisition, annotation, distributed model training and inference, and visualization.

Our partners span some of the most respected institutions working on wildfire risk, crop mapping, mangrove conservation, and forest protection. OlmoEarth sits within the AI for the Planet group at the Allen Institute for AI, a small, mission-driven team working on conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions.

Learn more: https://allenai.org/olmoearth

What We Believe

• The mission is the point. OlmoEarth exists to put powerful Earth observation tools into the hands of people working on conservation, food security, and climate. Every partner engagement this role supports is connected to that goal. If it matters to you that your day-to-day work adds up to something larger, you are in the right place.
• Good operations are invisible and indispensable. When coordination, documentation, and follow-through are working well, the whole team moves faster and partners have a better experience. This role is the engine behind that.
• Our partners are the signal. We learn what to build and how to improve by staying close to the people using the platform. The feedback, patterns, and friction you surface in this role directly shapes what the team works on next.
• In-person matters. A lot of the best work on this team happens in quick, unplanned conversations between engineering, research, and partnerships. We are mostly in the office because that is where this kind of collaboration happens naturally.
• Say what you think. We make better decisions when people share what they are actually seeing - whether that is a process that is not working, a partner need we are missing, or an idea for doing something differently. Everyone here is still learning, and we like it that way.

Your Next Challenge:

You will work with partners to deploy OlmoEarth for their use cases. This will require you to move fluidly across the entire OlmoEarth team, working with partners, engineers and researchers. You will make meaningful contributions to all the components of OlmoEarth’s infrastructure (from the finetuning code to model pretraining to our rslearn backend).

Use case enablement

• Collaborate closely with partners to deploy OlmoEarth models in challenging contexts. This will prioritize contexts and partners for which we don’t have immediate solutions or there’s an opportunity to standardize a high quality approach for common use cases.. 
• Explore novel use cases for the OlmoEarth models (e.g. post-hoc addition of new modalities, effectively leveraging embeddings in different contexts) which can unlock new use cases and partners.

Partner Communications & Coordination

• As part of model development, maintain communications with key partners to ensure their success using the OlmoEarth platform.
• Communicate  internally  so that partner needs are clearly understood by the OlmoEarth machine learning research, engineering and partnership teams. 

Product Improvement and Research

• Work closely with the engineering and partnerships  team to feed lessons you learn when deploying models into our infrastructure. This includes improvements to rslearn, OlmoEarth Studio. 
• Collaborate with the research team to identify and fix issues with the OlmoEarth models preventing their deployment in specific important applications. 
• Continually update our model adaptation approaches to improve model performance for all our partners. This includes updating our fine-tuning approaches, developing recipes for new applications and improving the UI so that modelling trade-offs can be better understood by users. 
• Support agent evaluations and development.

What You’ll Need:

Required

• 2+ years of experience deploying machine learning solutions. This covers the full stack of machine learning, including understanding the business case and requirements, training models, and deploying them at scale.
• Technical experience using machine learning tools. This includes fluency in PyTorch, experience debugging training loops and the ability to develop and deploy task-specific heads for encoders.
• Working experience with geospatial toolsets or platforms (e.g., Google Earth Engine, QGIS, ArcGIS); familiarity with remote sensing, Earth observation, or environmental science.
• Strong written communicator across a range of formats and audiences.
• Comfort navigating technical products and concepts; curiosity and self-driven learning aptitude
• Ability to operate independently with limited supervision.
• Demonstrates a strong ownership mindset, willing to roll up their sleeves and contribute wherever needed to help the team achieve its goals.
• Effective prioritization and organization skills; demonstrated ability to build repeatable processes and operational systems.
• Uses AI tools to move faster - and knows when to question their output.

Preferred

• Experience in a mission-driven, resource-constrained environment - startup urgency combined with an understanding of how organizations like NGOs, government agencies, and research institutions operate.
• Experience with self-supervised training methods for machine learning, particularly for ViT architectures.
• Comfort scanning technical literature to inform a conversation.
• Note: Some domestic and international travel is likely.

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 [email protected].

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.