Senior Software Engineer, Agent Platform

📋 Job Overview

We are a small engineering team at the Allen Institute for AI working on AI for the Planet. We're working on maritime conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions with some of the most impactful organizations on the planet. We work very closely alongside a ML research team and our Product & Partnerships teams, focused on building products that support our environmental and high-impact users.

🏢 About The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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.

🎯 The Role

You would build that foundation. That means the APIs those teams call, the SDK and CLI they install, the docs they read, the traces they use when something breaks, and the evaluation tooling that tells them whether their agent is any good. We want a developer outside our team to get from an idea to a running, observable agent without needing us on a call.

You would also be one of those developers. We build and operate our own agents on this platform for real users, and you would spend real time doing that too. It is how we find the problems before our customers do. The work spans both sides of the platform. You would build the services that run agents, and you would build the interfaces other engineers use to reach them.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve the platform APIs every agent depends on, covering registration, auth, secrets, deployment, runtime, events, discovery, and evaluation. Keep them stable, documented, and pleasant to use.
• Build the observability layer that shows developers what their agents are actually doing: logs, conversation history, execution traces, metrics, and failure reporting.
• Make evaluation a first-class part of the platform, so developers can define and run evals, compare versions, track quality over time, and see regressions early.
• Build and operate the services underneath all of it: identity and authorization, runtime orchestration, deployment, event routing, and the agent registry.
• Build agents yourself and run them in production, including prompt and tool design, quality and cost tuning, and keeping them healthy once real users depend on them.
• Watch for patterns that keep coming up in customer work and turn them into real platform features.
• Own the developer experience end to end: onboarding, quickstarts, SDKs, CLI tooling, example agents, API documentation, and a local development loop that works.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Range across web services, distributed systems, data pipelines, and cloud tooling.
• A track record of shipping products to external users and owning them in production.
• Opinions about API design, and a preference for simple designs over clever ones.
• Willingness to write documentation as part of the work rather than after it.
• Fluency with modern AI tools in your own workflow.
• A continuous learner who adapts quickly to the rapidly evolving landscape of LLMs and agent architectures.
• Clear technical communication with engineers and non-engineers

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience building developer platforms, SDKs, or public APIs for outside consumers.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM agents to production, including tool use, orchestration, sandboxing, and cost and latency tuning.
• Experience building evaluation or experimentation systems for nondeterministic software.
• Small or growth-stage company experience.
• Public technical work such as open source contributions, writing, or side projects.
• Willingness to travel on occasion.

🎁 Benefits

Our base salary range is $146,880 - $220,320, and in addition we have generous bonus plans to provide a competitive compensation package.

Benefits include:

• 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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.