Senior Software Engineer, Data

Persons in these roles are welcome to work remotely from any state in the US.

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

Who You Are:

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is hiring a Data Engineer to help integrate a large U.S. patent corpus into the Semantic Scholar platform. This NSF-funded role focuses on high-impact data engineering: linking patent and academic research data, resolving citations, disambiguating inventors and authors, applying topic models, and extending data products and APIs.

You’ll work in a high-performing engineering environment and own full-stack data tasks including building pipelines, integrating or training practical ML models, and deploying production services. This is not a research role, but you should be confident implementing ML-driven solutions when off-the-shelf tools don’t cut it.

This is a fixed term position scheduled for 2 years with the possibility of renewal.

Who We Are: 

The Semantic Scholar team builds open, production-grade systems that power scientific discovery and large-scale AI research. We focus on creating high-quality structured datasets, integrating diverse content types, and enabling downstream applications across search, citation analysis, and model training. The team combines strong engineering practices with close collaboration across Ai2’s product and research orgs to deliver tools and infrastructure used by millions of researchers and developers worldwide.

Your Next Challenge:

• Build scalable data pipelines (Airflow) for citation resolution and corpus integration
• Develop and deploy lightweight ML models for inventor disambiguation and author linking
• Train or adapt a topic model to classify patents using titles, abstracts, claims, and specs
• Extend REST APIs to expose linked metadata and topic classifications
• Contribute to dashboards and tools for evaluating data quality and model precision
• Collaborate with Ai2 engineers to ensure maintainability, test coverage, and robust deployment
• Produce reliable, well-documented code and contribute technical designs that support long-term maintainability

What You’ll Need:

Required:

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education.
• Strong Python engineering skills, especially for building and maintaining data pipelines
• Experience with SQL and schema design in production settings (PostgreSQL preferred)
• Familiarity with common ML workflows (training classifiers, tuning models, and deploying for inference), particularly for large-scale or ambiguous structured datasets
• Comfortable working with structured datasets (XML/JSON/Parquet) and writing ETL code
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (Airflow or similar) and cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS, S3, Docker)
• Strong communicator and a strong sense of ownership for results

Preferred:

• Experience with author disambiguation, entity resolution, or record linkage problems
• Experience applying vector-based similarity or topic modeling techniques to real-world corpora at scale
• Exposure to citation networks or scholarly data systems (e.g., arXiv, OpenAlex, USPTO)
• Comfort building internal APIs and dashboards to support ML and data quality review

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

• Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time. 
• The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations. 
• The ability to observe details at close range.
• Can work under deadlines.

A Little More About Ai2:

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.

In addition to Ai2’s core mission, we also aim to contribute to humanity through our treatment of each member of the Ai2 Team. Some highlights are:

• We are a learning organization – because everything Ai