Research Internship, OlmoEarth

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence • Seattle, WA

9d • Onsite

About The Position

Ai2 is seeking a passionate early-career AI researcher to join our team working on foundation modeling of Earth observation data. This internship offers a unique opportunity to work on impactful research at the intersection of foundation models and some of the biggest challenges facing our planet. We work across many areas including environmental monitoring, sustainability, wildfire resilience, food security, conservation, and beyond. We are a team of researchers and engineers building foundation models for Earth and making them broadly accessible for impactful applications. We recently released OlmoEarth, a spatio-temporal foundation model for Earth observation data that establishes a new Pareto frontier in computational efficiency and accuracy ( https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2511.13655 ). We also released a new platform that enables organizations without AI or engineering resources to leverage this technology for environmental and humanitarian applications: https://olmoearth.allenai.org/ . At Ai2, you will be working with world-class AI researchers and talented OlmoEarth software engineers. We perform team-based, ambitious research, with a mandate to strive for big breakthroughs—not just incremental progress—in an exciting and interactive workplace. We are building the foundation to support years of open science and research on Earth intelligence and planetary-scale modeling. All interns are paired with a mentor from the OlmoEarth research team and participate directly in Ai2’s groundbreaking work. We encourage open collaboration on intern projects, including with researchers and practitioners at external institutions, NGOs, and partner organizations. We are committed to open science and place no restrictions on publications based on internships. We are passionate about building open AI for good and using foundation models to tackle real-world environmental and humanitarian challenges.

Requirements

• Students (Ph.D., masters, or exceptional undergraduates) with a strong academic record.
• Experience and/or knowledge of modern deep learning (LLMs, vision transformers, SSL).
• Experience with foundation models (pretraining, finetuning, etc.).
• Interest in applying AI to address global challenges like wildfire and food insecurity.
• Expertise in Python and modern ML engineering stack (GitHub, CI, etc)

Nice To Haves

• Successful past internships or full time employment in a technical role.
• Highly proactive and self-motivated.
• Experience with satellite imagery.
• Demonstrated contributions to open source projects.
• Experience with working with large pretraining datasets (hundred TB → PB) datasets.
• Experience training large models on multi-node GPUs.
• Experience working with partners in the field on ML for EO.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead a high-impact research project using spatio-temporal Earth observation data.
• Train, evaluate, and contribute to the next generation of OlmoEarth.
• Build open-source software, tools, and benchmarks that enable environmental and humanitarian applications.
• Author scientific papers and technical reports for high-profile conferences or journals.

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 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 accrue sick days per year in line with Seattle sick time requirements.
• If you are usually scheduled to work on a holiday that Ai2 recognizes as a day off, you will be paid for this day.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 101-250 employees