Applied Research Scientist

Key Skills

Python Programming, Scala Programming, C++, Java Programming, Machine learning techniques, Data science techniques, SQL, Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, TensorFlow, PyTorch, R Programming

Job Description

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) 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 AI research and engineering.

AI2’s Perceptual Reasoning and Interaction Research team (PRIOR) seeks to advance computer vision to create AI systems that see, explore, learn, and reason about the world. PRIOR is currently seeking Research Scientists at all levels.

Who We Are:

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.
• 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 100+ (and growing) people who work here. We do. 

Your Next Challenge:

PRIOR is looking for Applied Research Scientists to work in a variety of areas in computer vision including:

• Recognition, detection and segmentation
• Scene analysis and understanding
• Embodied AI
• Language and Vision
• Visual knowledge extraction
• Visual reasoning
• Representation learning
• And more ...

Applied Research Scientists in the PRIOR team will work on multiple exciting research projects in the above areas, but will also have the opportunity to contribute and engage in a variety of other activities critical to our research and mission.

Your responsibilities may include:

• Building and evaluating deep learning models
• Collecting annotated data using crowdsourcing
• Writing and submitting research papers to top tier AI conferences
• Mentoring interns and pre-doctoral candidates
• And more ...

What You Will Need:

• Background in computer vision or machine learning
• Strong software development skills
• Strong prototyping skills to implement preliminary research ideas
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow, etc.)
• Strong collaboration skills - our environment is small and collaborative, and we'd like you to thrive on working closely with others.

Bonus qualifications:

• Publications in top-tier computer vision or machine learning conferences
• Experience building systems at scale
• Experience building deep learning packages or frameworks
• Experience with crowdsourced data collection (e.g., Amazon’s Mechanical Turk)