Research Scientist Robotics
Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute developing fully open models, datasets, tools, and applied AI systems for scientific discovery, the planet, and robotics.
Funding history
About Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)
Ai2 builds breakthrough AI around an open-development approach, publishing model weights, training code, training data, recipes, evaluations, and documentation. Its current work includes the Olmo language-model family, Molmo multimodal models, Tülu post-training models, the Asta scientific-agent ecosystem, and AI-for-the-planet products.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will investigate foundation models for robotics and develop open methods, datasets, benchmarks, and models. You will experiment with large-scale simulation tools and real robots, lead research projects, mentor students, publish scientific work, and collaborate with researchers at universities and other organizations.
Requirements
- PhD-level foundation in robot manipulation, planning and control, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, real-world robot systems, simulation environments, sim-to-real transfer, world models, or foundation models
- Strong publication record in AI-related areas
- Strong software engineering skills
- Experience with real robot systems or deep learning frameworks
- Research experience in large-scale multi-node training, training dynamics, efficiency, data curation, multimodal model debugging, or post-training methods
- Contributions to open-source research libraries
Responsibilities
- Develop and investigate core research problems in foundation models for robotics
- Develop open methods, datasets, benchmarks, and models
- Experiment with large-scale simulation tools and real robots
- Lead research projects
- Mentor interns and pre-doctoral candidates
- Author and present scientific papers
- Collaborate with researchers at universities and other organizations
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, life, accidental death and dismemberment, short-term disability, and long-term disability insurance
- Employee assistance program
- Voluntary life and accidental death and dismemberment insurance
- Health savings account, healthcare reimbursement arrangement, and flexible spending accounts
- 401k plan
- $125 monthly commuting or internet expense support
- $200 monthly fitness and wellbeing expense support
- Up to ten sick days, seven personal days, 20 vacation days, and twelve paid holidays annually
- Family leave
- Annual bonuses
- Long-term incentive plan