Research Engineer, FlexOlmo

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence • Seattle, WA

19h • Onsite

About The Position

Ai2 is seeking talented and motivated Research Engineer 2 to join the FlexOlmo team , working on a series of large language models designed for flexible data use , with a focus on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) , long-context language models (LCLMs) , and retrieval . You are a talented, hands-on engineer who thrives in a fast-paced environment, is self-directed, a team player, and knows how to get things done. You have a strong understanding of modern deep learning, natural language processing, language models, and the inner workings of the transformer architecture, especially MoEs. You can translate high-level goals into concrete research and implementation steps, set an approach, follow through, and present results. When it’s time to explain your ideas, you bring clarity to complex technical issues. You use these skills to create real-world benefits for researchers and other practitioners, and you are excited to help advance our effort to create the best-performing open AI model.
We are a non-profit AI institute, focused on developing foundational AI research and innovation to deliver real-world impact through large-scale open models, data, and artifacts (e.g., OLMo, Tulu, Asta, OlmoEarth). We unite the best and brightest scientific and engineering minds to explore the potential of truly open AI. Through our efforts, we endeavor to empower academics, researchers, and AI developers more broadly to advance language models and generative AI models. Through close collaboration, we rapidly identify, define, and act on the most exciting and promising new ideas in AI. The FlexOlmo team designs new architectures and training methods that help models use data more effectively—through improved training, inference-time conditioning, and retrieval—broadening the types of data they can leverage and ultimately enhancing performance. We also develop scientific methodologies for evaluating and understanding these systems. Our team produces high-impact research and expertly engineered open-source tools that accelerate NLP research worldwide. Our first release in July 2025 focused on a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture. Looking ahead, we plan to pursue creative, groundbreaking research that delivers scientific insights and practical solutions for building architectures and training methods that unlock the use of large and diverse data sources.
Why FlexOlmo? We are building the foundation for research into the next generation of language models designed for flexible data use. FlexOlmo is a small, tightly knit team, giving you the unique opportunity to work closely with team members towards one high-impact project. We encourage open collaboration on projects, even with researchers at external institutions. Our pay is competitive, and visa sponsorship is available. We are committed to open science and support freely publishing papers, as exemplified by our first release: FlexOlmo: Open Language Models for Flexible Data Use .

Requirements

• A bachelor’s degree in Data Science/CS/EE/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience, and expertise at building ML infrastructure.
• 4+ years of experience building infrastructure that handles data preprocessing/transformation and model training, evaluation, inference, and deployment.
• Experience in the complete model development cycle, including data set construction, training, tuning, evaluation, performance profiling, and monitoring.
• Knowledge of modern deep learning and natural language processing techniques.
• Strong software engineering skills, particularly around building performant systems and debugging.
• Must have experience with Python and PyTorch/Jax/Tensorflow as well as feel at ease in picking up new programming languages, libraries, or APIs as tools as project needs evolve.
• Familiarity working with cloud compute resources (e.g. AWS) and containerization (e.g. Docker).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills - our environment is small and collaborative, and we'd like you to thrive while working closely with others, sometimes with complementary skills/perspectives.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree in Data Science/CS/EE/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP or related fields and/or relevant and equivalent engineering experience.
• Contributions to open-source ML or research libraries (e.g. spaCy, AllenNLP, transformers).
• Experience successfully operating models at scale in a production setting.
• Experience in HPC settings.
• Curiosity about AI research.

Responsibilities

• Building infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of LLM research around flexible data use.
• Optimizing training and inference for language models.
• Triaging between experiments and executing on the most impactful.
• Bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and a widely adopted product.
• Bringing software engineering best practices to a research environment.
• Supporting and collaborating with an open-source community.
• Releasing your contributions back to the broader community in the form of open source software, model releases, and additions to Ai2’s public API and open research datasets, as well as technical reports.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level