Sr. Software Engineer, Semantic Scholar

Who You Are:

You are a hands-on developer that thrives in a fast-paced environment, is self-directed, a team player, and knows how to get things done while still delivering flexible and maintainable code. You’re not afraid to take on big challenges and dabble with both UI and algorithmic code. If you have a passion for driving quality, improving customer experience and designing maintainable and robust systems, we’d love to talk to you!

Who We Are:

Semantic Scholar is a Research and Product Development team within the Allen Institute for AI. We provide free, AI-driven search and discovery tools, and open resources for the global research community. Our system extracts meaning and identifies connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help Scholars discover and understand research. We index over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.

Your Next Challenge:

Semantic Scholar’s online engineering team is looking for an experienced engineer to help us build tools and features to help more researchers to do better, faster research. The emphasis is on the front end experience and search services, but you will also have the opportunity to work with research scientists to create new and state of the art research tools that will help millions of researchers with their daily research.

World class communication, engineering, and leadership skills are essential in this role. As a technical leader, you will partner in scaling a consumer product, identifying and alleviating engineering bottlenecks, driving feature development on key initiatives, and establishing best practices. You should be comfortable working closely in a team, building technical buy-in, and balancing effective design reviews with quick delivery.

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

Engage in the entire software development lifecycle; from ideation and design to implementation and testing to deployment and operational support.
Scale our systems in a cost effective and sustainable manner and be a driving force behind continuous improvements in reliability and automation.
Generate impact and team velocity through efforts in but not limited to: software design and feature development, platform and framework development (e.g. machine learning experimentation capabilities), capacity planning, and deployment tooling and infrastructure.
Help set and maintain best practices in how we measure, monitor, and respond to system availability, latency, and general application health.
Mentor less-senior engineers on the team in both technical and non-technical skills.

What You’ll Need:

Minimum qualifications:

BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field where software development is
a key component, or equivalent industry experience.
5+ years of experience building high quality software and services
Experience in algorithm design, data structures, complexity and risk analysis, and
software architecture.
Experience in one or more of the following (or similar) languages:
Javascript, Typescript, Python, Java, Scala

Preferred qualifications:

Experience designing, scaling and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems.
Experience creating and developing front-end web applications, and working with design to make wireframes and mock-ups for real, interactive features.
Experience creating, evaluating, scaling and operating production machine learning models.
Experience with AWS (or similar) cloud development.
Heightened sense of ownership for the performance and stability of services that provide value to millions of users.
Ability to think systematically about improving the process of developing and supporting software and the skills to translate these concerns into outcomes for our users and team.
Growth mindset: a desire to stretch the definition of the role and find additional ways to provide impact in a small team.

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.

Occasionally required to remain seated in a normal position for long periods of time.
Regularly required to walk short distances
Regularly required to maintain balance while walking, standing, crouching, or running.
Routinely required to reach up and out with hands and arms

A Little More About AI2:

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen and headed by Professor Oren Etzioni. The core mission of AI2 is to contribute to humanity through high-impact research in artificial intelligence.

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 AI2 does is ground-breaking, we are learning every day. Similarly, through weekly AI2 Academy lectures, a wide variety of world-class AI experts as guest speakers, and our commitment to your personal on-going education, AI2 is a place where you will have opportunities to continue learning alongside your coworkers.
We value diversity - We seek to hire, support, and promote people from all genders, ethnicities, and all levels of experience regardless of age. We particularly encourage applications from women, non-binary individuals, people of color, members of the LGBTQA+ community, and people with disabilities of any kind.
We value inclusion - We understand the value that people's individual experiences and perspectives can bring to an organization, and we are building a culture in which all voices are heard, respected and considered.
We emphasize a healthy work/life balance – we believe our team members are happiest and most productive when their work/life balance is optimized. While we value powerful research results which drive our mission forward, we also value dinner with family, weekend time, and vacation time. We offer generous paid vacation and sick leave as well as family leave.
We are collaborative and transparent – we consider ourselves a team, all moving with a common purpose. We are quick to cheer our successes, and even quicker to share and jointly problem solve our failures.
We are in Seattle – and our office is on the water! We have mountains, we have lakes, we have four seasons, we bike to work, we have a vibrant theater scene, and we have so much else. We even have kayaks for you to paddle right outside our front door. We welcome interest from applicants from outside of the United States.
We are friendly– chances are you will like every one of the 200+ (and growing) people who work here. We do.

AI2 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view the related Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision by clicking on their corresponding links.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants with disabilities to the full extent required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you feel you need a reasonable accommodation pursuant to the ADA, you are encouraged to contact us at recruiting@allenai.org

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 are eligible to receive up to $150 reimbursement for health and wellbeing expenses per month. 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.

The Allen Institute for AI

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Sr. Software Engineer, Semantic Scholar