Senior Designer

Remote eligible: Persons in these roles are welcome to work remotely from any location.

Base Yearly Compensation: $115,380 - $170,760

Senior Designer

Who You Are:

AI2 is looking for a talented individual to design and assist with the implementation of software interfaces and graphic materials that demonstrate our cutting-edge research and enhance awareness of our institute and our mission.

Who We Are: 

This is a high-impact role on our Research Visualization team (ReViz) where you will work closely with researchers, engineers, product managers, and others across the institute to design and build compelling visual experiences for cutting-edge research demonstrations and software, as well as graphic elements used in AI2’s communications and media. 

As a Senior Designer at AI2, your role will have autonomy, flexibility, and variety. You’ll be involved in a spectrum of design practices, from cultivating general, high-level design direction for the institute to the specifics of software interfaces. Your responsibilities will include everything from ambiguous, ambitious visualizations that help reveal the inner workings of complicated machine learning models to crafting new layouts, branding, and logo designs for our projects. And sometimes a new t-shirt design! We’re a small company where people wear lots of hats – you should be comfortable with and thrive in that type of environment. This role is best for someone who is skilled at working autonomously and proactively prioritizing work to maximize impact.

To get a more concrete idea of the type of UX work you’ll be doing, take a look at some of our existing projects and interfaces:

• The allenai.org website, the main information hub for the wider world about our institute and its mission.
• Our collection of demos built to showcase AI2’s unique interactive models and datasets, including popular models Unified-IO and Ask Delphi
• The Computer Vision Explorer, a suite of interactive demos illustrating the state-of-the-field for computer vision.
• The AI2 leaderboards, where we encourage collaboration on common AI tasks by transparently sharing recent approaches and advances.

Your Next Challenge:

We’re looking for a multifaceted designer comfortable in the realms of both user experience and graphical design to join our small, high-impact team. You should have a passion for creating elegant, effective end-user experiences, with some hands-on experience bringing these things to life in a development environment. Our organization offers high autonomy and flexibility; you should be organized, self-starting, and comfortable with proactively navigating ambiguity. You should be excellent at collaborating and communicating effectively across roles and prioritizing your efforts for maximum impact.

Our research and engineering teams iterate rapidly and release often. You should love creating efficient solutions to complex problems. You should be able to effectively communicate design principles and your specific design ideas to non-designers, and take critical feedback in stride as you iterate quickly toward the final experience. Startup experience is a plus.

The essential functions include, but are not limited to the following:

• Designing interfaces and visuals for a diverse range of client devices and mediums
• Working directly with researchers and engineers to develop and drive clarity around new interfaces through quick iteration
• Effectively balancing design ideals against limitations/practicalities of implementation
• Working directly with users to understand and distill requirements into effective solutions for feature updates or new interfaces
• Developing and extending style guides and branding materials
• Creating illustrations, logos, icons, and other graphical elements
• Designing for print and other physical materials and working with print vendors

What You’ll Need:

• A portfolio of previously designed software products that demonstrates a passion for user experience and for creating beautiful, elegant, and smart interfaces
• Experience with a particular tool for creating mockups, ideally Figma
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills
• A solid high-level understanding of HTML, CSS and the building blocks of web user interfaces
• Some development experience working directly with the implementation of content management systems, web component libraries, and databases/APIs strongly preferred
• Experience building both mobile and desktop web interfaces strongly preferred
• A minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree, 3 years of experience and a Master’s degree, or equivalent professional experience or training

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

As a remote eligible role, candidates are welcome to work in whatever environment is best supportive of their individual productivity. Candidates should be capable of visiting the AI2 offices in person for occasional team planning meetings or other events if possible, on a minimum quarterly basis. More frequent attendance at AI2 offices is welcome and encouraged. AI2 offers a well-lit, open office environment with low to medium noise levels and with ADA compliant facilities.

A Little More About AI2:

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen. 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 a 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 200+ (and growing) people who work here. We do. 

AI2 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. You may view the related Know Your Rights compliance poster and the Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination Provision by clicking on their corresponding links. 

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to employees and applicants with disabilities to the full extent required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). If you feel you need a reasonable accommodation pursuant to the ADA, you are encouraged to contact us at recruiting@allenai.org 

Benefits:

Team members and their families are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life insurance, basic accidental death and dismemberment insurance, short-term disability, long-term disability, and an employee assistance program. Team members are able to enroll in our voluntary life insurance program, our voluntary accidental death and dismemberment program, our health savings account plan, our healthcare reimbursement arrangement plan, and our health care and dependent care flexible spending account plans. Team members are able to enroll in our company’s 401k plan. Team members will receive $125 per month to assist with commuting or internet expenses and are eligible to receive up to $150 reimbursement for health and wellbeing expenses per month. Team members will also receive up to ten sick days per year, up to seven personal days per year, up to 20 vacation days per year and twelve paid holidays throughout the calendar year.