Senior Software Engineer, Agent Frameworks & SDKs

The Allen Institute for AI; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 126,000 - 189,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

401k plan

Commuting stipend $125/mo

Wellbeing allowance $200/mo

Vacation & holidays

Job summary

The Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, WA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build the foundational architecture behind AI research agents. You will design the systems that define how agents, tools, and services interact, and develop SDKs, APIs, and execution frameworks for researchers to build, evaluate, and scale intelligent systems.

This role emphasizes developing developer-facing infrastructure, sandboxed execution, benchmarking, and reliable deployment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of technical experience; relevant experience may substitute for education.
• Strong Python engineering skills with production services and developer-facing tools.
• Experience designing SDKs, APIs, or frameworks that other engineers build on top of and adopt.
• Hands-on experience building or operating agentic systems – agent orchestration, tool integration, sandboxed execution, memory management, or the surfaces agents run in and consume.
• Experience designing evaluation or benchmarking infrastructure that measures system or component performance.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar), containerization, and deployment automation.
• Strong communication skills and a sense of ownership for results.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the frameworks, SDKs, and execution surfaces that define how agents, tools, and services interact across our research platform
• Build infrastructure for sandboxed agent execution, enabling researchers to safely run, inspect, and iterate on agent workflows at scale
• Design and maintain evaluation and benchmarking frameworks that measure the performance of individual agent components and end‑to‑end systems
• Develop the abstractions and developer‑facing tooling that let research scientists build, compose, and deploy agents without owning the underlying infrastructure
• Drive continuous improvements in reliability, observability, and cost‑efficiency across the systems agents run in and depend on
• Engage in the entire software development lifecycle, from ideation and design to implementation and testing to deployment and operational support
• Collaborate across engineering and research teams to ensure maintainability, test coverage, and robust deployment
• Communicate effectively across engineering, product, and research teams to align priorities and drive projects to completion

Skills

Python engineering

Distributed systems

APIs/SDKs design

Cloud infrastructure

Developer tooling/observability

Communication/ownership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

AWS

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

The Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, WA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build the foundational architecture behind AI research agents. You will design the systems that define how agents, tools, and services interact, and develop SDKs, APIs, and execution frameworks for researchers to build, evaluate, and scale intelligent systems.

This role emphasizes developing developer-facing infrastructure, sandboxed execution, benchmarking, and reliable deployment.