Senior Software Engineer, Data

Overview

Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle. On‑site requirements vary based on position and team. Our base salary range is $126,000 - $189,000, and we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to build the data infrastructure behind AI research agents that explore and reason over scholarly literature. You'll work on the Semantic Scholar corpus, expanding what it covers and improving the quality of what's already there, and create the APIs and tooling that these agents rely on at scale.

This role sits at the intersection of data engineering and applied ML. You'll own pipelines, design schemas, and ship production services, but you'll also apply practical ML techniques (entity resolution, text classification, embedding‑based similarity) to improve data quality and enrich metadata at scale, directly shaping what the agents can do. We’re looking for a strong engineer who is comfortable across that full range.

Responsibilities

• Improve the coverage and quality of the Semantic Scholar corpus across academic papers, patents, and new domain‑specific datasets
• Build and maintain scalable data pipelines for corpus integration, citation resolution, and metadata enrichment
• Develop and deploy ML models for entity disambiguation, author linking, and topic classification
• Design and extend APIs that expose structured scholarly data to academic researchers and AI agent workflows
• Contribute to dashboards and tools for evaluating data quality and model precision
• Collaborate across engineering and research teams to ensure maintainability, test coverage, and robust deployment

Qualifications

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education.
• Strong Python engineering skills, especially for building and maintaining data pipelines.
• Experience with SQL and schema design in production settings (PostgreSQL preferred).
• Familiarity with ML workflows (training classifiers, tuning models, deploying for inference), particularly for large‑scale or ambiguous structured datasets.
• Comfortable working with structured data formats (XML/JSON/Parquet) and writing ETL code.
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow or similar) and cloud infrastructure (AWS, S3, Docker).
• Strong communicator and a strong sense of ownership for results.

Preferred:

• Experience with author disambiguation, entity resolution, or record linkage problems.
• Experience applying vector‑based similarity or topic modeling techniques to real‑world corpora at scale.
• Exposure to citation networks or scholarly data systems (e.g., arXiv, OpenAlex, USPTO).
• Familiarity with building APIs or data services consumed by automated or agent‑based workflows.

Physical Demands and Work Environment

• Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods.
• 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.

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 401(k) 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.

Equal Opportunity Employment

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. Employees may view the Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision.

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 View email address on click.appcast.io.