I got a phone interview offer for RE (Research Engineer) role from highly regarded (non-profit) AI research lab (AI2) founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. I am a new grad here, and it's been about 6 months since I joined Amazon. The WLB is decent, and I am on good track and have a great working relationship with my current manager (my OLR feedback was good) and coworkers. However, I am currently a bit dissatisfied with projects that are assigned to me because they are not interesting to me. My interests are at the intersection of ML and NLP. Should I stay at Amazon? I have some pros and cons based on what I researched about AI2 Pros (AI2): - highly collaborative, research environment - strong academic ties: AI2 hosts visiting scholars, collaborates with and funds professors and postdocs - writing and submitting research papers to top tier AI conference, which will potentially open doors to top PhD program in ML. I looked at some profile of REs who are working there, and a lot of them had their names on top AI conferences like EMNLP, etc. Cons: - unclear career trajectory - ok compensation. Since it's non-profit, I heard they only give you base salary + signing bonus. no stocks Current TC: 144k (CAD) YOE: < 1
AI2 is very prestigious. More than FAAMG (excluding Brain, DeepMind, FAIR, MSR). This is coming from a research engineer at a top competitor.
Do you think being RE at AI2 would strengthen my profile for graduate admission, better than staying at Amazon? The reason why I am asking is that I have never heard of AI2 until recently, but I don't know how reputable it is in academia