Senior Research Engineer, AllenNLP

Remote hybrid: Persons in these roles are expected to spend part of their time on-site in our Seattle offices and may occasionally work remotely from their home in the Greater Seattle area. On-site requirements vary based on position and team. If you have questions about Hybrid work arrangements for this role, please ask your recruiter.

Compensation Range: $153,040 - $235,680

Senior Research Engineer, AllenNLP

Who We Are: 

Open Language Model (OLMo) is the AI2 LLM framework designed to provide access to data, training code, models, and evaluation code necessary to advance AI through open research to empower academics and researchers to study the science of language models collectively. The goal is to share a high quality and open language model that will provide an avenue for people in the AI research community to work directly on language models for the first time. Following the launch of OLMo (Open Language Model), AI2 is now embarking on furthering research to provide scientific insights and solutions on how to substantially close the gap with the state-of-the-art in adapted models.

Who You Are: 

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 deep knowledge of Python, and a strong understanding of modern deep learning, natural language processing, and the inner workings of the transformer architecture. 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 large language model.

Your Next Challenge: 

You will be a part of the core team of research and machine learning engineers working on the infrastructure, architecture, modeling and training of OLMo (Open Language Model). In this role you will be owning the design and implementation of the code that trains the OLMo models. You will be responsible for building scalable machine learning pipelines as we push the boundaries of large language modeling research. You will be collaborating with colleagues inside and outside your own team, but you are responsible for a feature or experiment from start to finish, from conception to implementation.

The essential functions include, but are not limited to the following:

• Building infrastructure to facilitate the next generation of LLM research
• Optimizing training and inference for language models
• Triaging between experiments and executing on the most impactful
• Supporting and collaborating with an open-source community
• Bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and a widely adopted product
• Bringing software engineering best practices to a research environment
• 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 Corpus

What You’ll Need: 

• Expertise at building ML infrastructure - having 4+ years of industry experiences building infrastructure that handles data preprocessing/transformation and model training, evaluation, and deployment
• Deep 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
• At-home with on-hands programming – must have experience with Python and PyTorch/Jax/Tensorflow. We expect you to be the kind of engineer who can pick up a new programming language, library, or API as needed without it being a big deal.
• 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

Bonus qualifications:

• 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

Education:

• BS or MS in Com