Senior Software Engineer, Agent Platform (AI for the Planet)

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence•Seattle, WA

3d•$146,880 - $220,320•Onsite

About The Position

We are a small engineering team at the Allen Institute for AI, part of AI for the Planet. Our organization works on maritime conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions with some of the most impactful organizations on the planet. This team focuses on how we build, ship, and run agentic tools across multiple programs. We work through infrastructure, security, evaluation, user-interfaces, and monitoring for workflows that are highly non-deterministic, and we form product opinions about a field that is still taking shape. The mission is the point. We're building AI for the planet: environmental conservation, food security, climate. If it's important to you to work on problems with a positive impact on our planet and the world, you're in the right place. The engineer closest to the user makes the best decisions. We put weight on talking to users, sitting with partnerships, and working side by side with researchers. You can't ship the right thing if you don't understand who you're shipping it for. This engineering team travels regularly to meet with users. Iterate small. Our users are tackling huge problems: illegal fishing, food security, climate resilience. They need tools that genuinely help. We believe the fastest way to build those tools is to design and build alongside them as partners: ship something functional, learn from how they use it, and iterate from there. Keeping users in the loop is how we build a better system, faster. We ship high-quality code quickly, and we learn fast from mistakes. We hold a high bar for what we put into production, but we also move with urgency. When something breaks, we focus on understanding the system, not blaming individuals. Failures are signals that help us strengthen the layers that protect our users. In-person matters. A lot of the best work on this team happens in unscheduled hallway conversations between engineering, research, and partnerships. We're in the office most days because that's where the team is at its best. We hire for curiosity. The technologies we use will change over the years, and the engineers who do well here are the ones who enjoy learning new things, not the ones who've memorized a particular toolkit. Ideas get better when they're challenged. We make decisions by talking them through - asking questions, pushing back when something doesn't quite add up, and being open to changing our minds. Everyone here is still learning, and we like it that way. We are building a platform for conservation groups, government agencies, and research organizations that want to run AI agents against their own systems. They know their domain and they have the data. We give them the tools to build an agent, see what it is doing, and tell whether it is any good. You would work across the whole platform, from core services to the tools, UI and API interfaces, docs, and evals authors use, and help decide what those should become as the field changes. You would also build and run agents of your own, so you know the platform as a user. Much of the job is spent with partners: meeting their developers, sometimes on site, seeing where they get stuck, and turning recurring problems into platform improvements. We expect you to form opinions about what to build, argue for them, and change them when users show you otherwise.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Experience across the stack: web UIs, backend services, CLIs, and cloud tooling. You move between them as the work needs.
A track record of shipping products to external users and talking with those users directly.
Good judgment about priorities: you fix blockers first and keep scope small.
Clean, tested code, and experience reviewing other people's code.
Opinions about API design, and a preference for simple designs over clever ones.
Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, including writing your own skills or tools.
Willingness to write documentation as part of the work rather than after it.
Clear technical communication with engineers and non-engineers.

Nice To Haves

Experience building developer tools, CLIs, SDKs, or public APIs for outside users.
Experience building or running LLM agents, including prompts, tools, and evals.
Experience building evaluation or experimentation systems.
Small or growth-stage company experience.
Public technical work such as open source contributions, writing, or side projects.
Willingness to travel on occasion.

Responsibilities

Build and evolve the platform's core capabilities and interfaces.
Own the experience of authoring agents on the platform, from the first build all the way through production deployment.
Build the UI, CLI, and SDK that authors use to deploy agents, run evals, and understand what happened.
Develop our own internal agents on the platform and operate them in production.
Write the docs, quickstarts, and example agents that get an outside developer from an idea to a running agent.
Decide with the team what to work on next, and fix what blocks users before starting larger features.
Write small tools and skills that make the team faster.
Work closely with our PM team on what to build next, and with the other engineers on the platform.