Software Engineer II, Front-End

You are a software engineer who enjoys building web applications. You like thinking about how to make sites that are easy to use, fast, and accessible. You’re someone who thrives in a small, dynamic organization where there can sometimes be large amounts of ambiguity and autonomy. You’re self-directed and enjoy working independently while still having fun technical conversations with your team to determine the best route forward. A key interest you have is in extending our public web presence at allenai.org. If you would like to collaborate with us to implement ideas around communicating our work to the greater world we would love to talk to you.

You’re interested in being the resident expert in building for the web. Your focus will be on the front-end, working in technologies like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. There will be an opportunity to work on the supporting back-end services, deployment infrastructure and other tooling as well - but this is a potential growth area and not something we’ll assess in the interview or expect of you.

Your Next Challenge:

You will collaborate with our communications team, researchers, and engineers to present our institute clearly to the outside world. You will also work with the rest of the team to develop demos for research applications and internal tools to help us organize and present our research. For example, your next challenge might be building a website to highlight the impact of the Aristo research project, building a portal to present our fundraising strategy as a nonprofit organization, or partnering with other engineers to build infrastructure that organizes our research datasets and publications.

• A strong interest and focus on user experience.
• 2+ years of industry experience building high quality web applications
• Fluency in JavaScript, CSS and HTML.
• Interest or experience using TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Webpack. While we don’t require familiarity with these technologies, you should expect to gain expertise in them at AI2.
• A solid understanding of the mechanics of a web browser, the differences between server-side and client execution, and the basics of the HTTP protocol.
• Experience parenting directly with product and design to develop websites.
• A basic understanding of UNIX development tools like git and bash, and an understanding of how programming languages like Go and Python different from JavaScript.

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 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.