Senior Software Engineer, Skylight

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: $140,230 - $213,150

About Skylight: 

Skylight is one of Ai2's groundbreaking AI for Conservation programs, dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans by combating illegal fishing. Our advanced AI-powered platform delivers real-time vessel detections and actionable insights that empower enforcement agencies globally to protect marine ecosystems.

With Skylight’s cutting-edge AI technology and analytics, those working to safeguard marine life can quickly identify illegal fishing activities, ensuring that our oceans remain healthy and resilient.  By supporting more effective enforcement and compliance, we play a vital role in preserving marine life and ensuring the health of our oceans for generations to come.

Read more about the Skylight program at our website here

About This Role: 

We are looking for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit and deep experience building high quality, scalable full-stack products that integrate state-of-the-art ML models. This candidate should be enthusiastic and opinionated about languages, frameworks, tools, and software engineering processes. Above all, this person must be passionate about applying their skills to address critical environmental challenges and tackle really hard technical problems.

On the Skylight Engineering Team at Ai2, we ingest and analyze an enormous quantity of position data and satellite imagery in order to show our users where to focus their enforcement efforts. Our team directly supports our ML team through developing annotation systems and operating models at a huge scale. We have close relationships with our users, and as a non-profit, we take pride in holding ourselves accountable to global impact, rather than traditional metrics like user counts and revenue.

You’ll do well here if:

You are an awesome coder

• You are knowledgeable and opinionated about software engineering practices including things like coding patterns, breaking down work, reviewing code, build systems, testing policies, and more.  
• You have the ability to responsibly operate the production environment by delving into logs and metrics, and diving into whatever data and code is needed to develop actionable insight. 
• You actively use AI in your day to day coding and have found ways to code significantly faster with tools like ChatGPT and Github Copilot.

You deeply care about the full product lifecycle

• You contribute to features across the stack, from idea to delivery, by taking an active role in product definition and requirements gathering, architecture design, and writing mission critical code.
• You are proficient in documenting a technical plan, receiving feedback on it, and engaging in technical discussions.
• You pride yourself as a technical expert and are comfortable providing technical details to leadership and customers.

You are passionate about your work

• You have passion for applying your skills and knowledge to improve our planet.
• You are simultaneously collaborative and autonomous.
• You want to work with others who are also driven by impact.

You’ll thrive in this role if:

You have a strong background in Data Pipelines and Web Applications

• You have web engineering experience using frameworks such as Python/Flask and NodeJs/Express.
• You have experience designing, developing, and maintaining GraphQL, gRPC, or RESTful APIs. 
• You have built applications on top of NoSQL platforms such as MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and relational databases like PostgreSQL. 
• You have worked with streaming data systems like Kafka. 
• You are comfortable working in a cloud environment, such as Google Cloud, AWS or Azure.
• You have experience with deployment technologies, such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
• You’re not afraid to jump into the frontend and work on React/Typescript. 

You’re constantly learning

• You keep up to date with new technologies, languages and releases.
• You are always bumping package versions to get the latest features.
• You enjoy prototyping and quickly trying out new ideas. 

You have experience deploying AI models into production environments

• You’ve collaborated with researchers and machine learning experts to integrate pre-trained models into scalable production systems.
• You’ve navigated the complexities of delivering real-time inference to users, considering performance, scaling, accuracy monitoring, and user experience challenges.
• You’re experienced with model versioning, artifact management, and handling GPU-enabled workloads.

You thrive in complex and ambiguous environments

• You are comfortable wearing multiple hats, collaborating across teams, and interfacing directly with users to understand needs. 
• You enjoy working cross-functionally, including with product, design, and operations teams.
• You’re open to occasional international travel to meet directly with our users.

(Note: We don’t expect you to meet all of the above points! If you’re excited about this role and meet most of the core requirements, we encourage you to apply.)

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or relevant experience
• A minimum of 5 years of software development experience

Projects:

To give you a better idea of the kinds of projects you’d work on, here are some examples of our previous and current projects:

• AIS Data Pipeline & Track Generation: Our largest data source is a real-time feed of global AIS data, about 1k messages per second that we use to compute vessel trajectories in real-time using Kafka Streams. This data stream is great, but very messy. Our algorithms have to sift through the noise very quickly to find the signal. Our Machine Learning models take these computed trajectories as input to predict vessel behaviors. 
• Sentinel-2 vessel detections: We use the Sentinel-2 Satellites from the European Space Agency to detect locations of vessels globally in near-real-time.  Our data-pipelines download imagery as soon as it’s available and run our state-of-the-art computer vision models to detect vessels and make these observations available to our users, typically in under 4 hours from an image being taken. You can read more about this project in our blog post here.
• Tip & Cue: Working with our partners at Maxar, we’ve built a first of its kind system that can task high resolution satellites to capture imagery of vessels based on other indicators, such as AIS vessel behavior, fully automated with no humans in the loop.  This enables Skylight to potentially capture images of illegal fishing in-progress to aid in enforcement.  This project involved multiple integrations with external systems, a data pipeline that could match saved filter criteria against , and building out an advanced query interface to allow users to customize tip criteria to their specific areas.   You can read more about this work in our blog post here.

We care way more about your ability to learn new technologies than knowing our current stack, but since we know you’ll ask, here is our current tech stack:

• React/Typescript web-app on a GraphQL API
• Python microservices, mostly Flask HTTP APIs, some gRPC. 
• Kafka streams data pipelines, on Java and Python. 
• ElasticSearch, MongoDB, Redis for data persistence
• Docker / Kubernetes / Terraform on Google Cloud
• PyTorch models

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 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. 

This employer participates in E-Verify and will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the U.S. If E-Verify cannot confirm that you are authorized to work, this employer is required to give you written instructions and an opportunity to contact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or Social Security Administration (SSA) so you can begin to resolve the issue before the employer can take any action against you, including terminating your employment. Employers can only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.

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 $200 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.
• Team members will be able to receive annual bonuses and can participate in the long-term incentive plan.

Note: This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the team members(s) of this position. Team members will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. All duties and responsibilities are essential functions and requirements and are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. To perform this job successfully, the team member(s) will possess the skills, aptitudes, and abilities to perform each duty proficiently. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health or safety of themselves or others. The requirements listed in this document are the minimum levels of knowledge, skills, or abilities. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an at will relationship.