Senior Software Engineer, AI for the Planet

Persons in these roles are expected to work from our offices in Seattle.

Requirements

vary based on position and team. If you have questions about on-site work arrangements for this role, please ask your recruiter.

Compensation

package.

Who We Are

: We are a small engineering team at the Allen Institute for AI working on AI for the Planet. We're working on maritime conservation, food security, disaster resilience, and climate solutions with some of the most impactful organizations on the planet. We work very closely alongside a ML research team and our Product Partnerships teams, focused on building products that support our environmental and high-impact users.

Today, our team works on two products: Skylight uses AI to detect illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing in real time. Governments, enforcement agencies, and conservation organizations in 95+ countries use it to protect their waters. Our advanced AI-powered platform delivers real-time vessel detections and actionable insights that empower enforcement agencies globally to protect marine ecosystems.

org/skylight . OlmoEarth is an open, end-to-end platform built around our family of foundation models for Earth observation. The OlmoEarth Platform enables our users to create custom fine-tuned models to detect and classify novel geospatial features.

The platform handles the full loop: imagery acquisition from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, and Landsat; annotation; distributed training and inference; and a viewer so the outputs are usable by people who aren't ML experts. Partners today include NASA JPL (wildfire risk), IFPRI (crop mapping in Kenya), Global Mangrove Watch, and the Amazon Conservation Alliance. org/olmoearth .

If you're the kind of engineer who gets energized by building technology that helps protect oceans, forests, and the climate, who wants to move fast, work across disciplines, and see your code have real-world impact, this is for you. What We Believe: The mission is the point. We're building AI for the planet: environmental conservation, food security, climate.

If it’s important to you to work on problems with a positive impact on our planet and the world, you’re in the right place. The engineer closest to the user makes the best decisions. We put weight on talking to users, sitting with partnerships, and working side by side with researchers.

You can't ship the right thing if you don't understand who you're shipping it for. This engineering team travels regularly to meet with users. Iterate small.

Our users are tackling huge problems: illegal fishing, food security, climate resilience. They need tools that genuinely help. We believe the fastest way to build those tools is to design and build alongside them as partners: ship something functional, learn from how they use it, and iterate from there.

Keeping users in the loop is how we build a better product, faster. We ship high-quality code quickly, and we learn fast from mistakes. We hold a high bar for what we put into production, but we also move with urgency.

When something breaks, we focus on understanding the system, not blaming individuals. Failures are signals that help us strengthen the layers that protect our users. In-person matters.

A lot of the best work on this team happens in unscheduled hallway conversations between engineering, research, and partnerships. We're in the office most days because that's where the team is at its best. We hire for curiosity.

The technologies we use will change over the years, and the engineers who do well here are the ones who enjoy learning new things, not the ones who've memorized a particular toolkit. Ideas get better when they're challenged.