Senior NLP Scientist (Dialogue Systems)

Wizard is on a mission to build the most powerful AI-driven conversational commerce platform. Our B2B software empowers brands to transact with consumers via text, launching an entirely new sales channel to capture increased transactions, conversions, engagement and loyalty. C-commerce is exploding to a $1 Trillion market in the next decade and Wizard is positioned to become the dominant technology in the space. 

Wizard is backed by Marc Lore and a $50M Series A from top tech VCs. We’re quickly scaling our team and technology and seeking passionate and growth-minded tech talent to join the ride.

The Role

Wizard is currently seeking a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Scientist to join our founding team to lead the development of groundbreaking dialogue systems for c-commerce applications. Our engineering and data science teams are creating a unique and frictionless user experience from discovery to purchase using only natural language. It will be you who will frame the problem of creating behavior-changing user experience paths in c-commerce using cutting edge conversational UX design, knowledge representation, and conversational AI methods.  

You will define the strategy and the execution plan of innovating and developing technology that involves high-performing language, machine learning, and information retrieval models at a very large scale. With the aid of unprecedented market opportunity and the inflection point of advances of the language technologies, we are aiming at forever transforming how people experience shopping.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive the design and development of modern dialogue system to support customer journey from discovery to purchase;
• Develop NLP and NLG methods to discover intent and extract relevant information from short-format user conversations using a combination of recurrent, attention and  transformer-based neural network models, deep reinforcement learning models, and traditional NLP techniques;
• Develop optimal design of dialogue state tracking and policy learning to meet user experience and business goals;
• Design and implement methods for conversational data augmentation and work with the data analytics team to extract valuable metadata, models, and insights to drive better user experience and business intelligence; 
• Innovate, develop and test state-of-the-art approaches to solve challenging problems in conversational AI;
• Partner end-to-end with product managers, data scientists, software engineers, and conversational UX designers to understand customer requirements, design prototypes, and bring innovative solutions from design to production;
• Stay up to date with the latest research trends that could improve our product;
• Produce sound experimental results to enable decision-making as we iterate on a project;
• Be results oriented in the face of ambiguous problems and uncertain outcomes;
• Lead the research, create publications, and present research work at the top conferences in machine learning, computational linguistics, and related areas.

What We Are Looking For

• Ph.D in Computer Science or a related technical field with the specific focus on latest research in ML/AI related to language technologies and NLP
• Expertise in conversational AI and dialogue systems, ideally with experience in both task-oriented and open-domain systems, as well as hybrid architectures with the hierarchy of collaborative agents
• Experience in modern Deep Learning and NLP techniques and frameworks, including Transformers, seq2seq with attention, RNNs, gensim, fasttext, spacy, scikitlearn, pandas, etc.
• Deep understanding of dialogue-state architectures, dialogue state tracking, policy learning, and how to recognize dialogue acts and context to drive conversation sessions to their goal
• Solid knowledge and intuitive understanding from practice of classification methods, feature engineering, information extraction, structured prediction, clustering semi-supervised learning, topic modeling, and ranking
• Experience in distributed computing ML frameworks like Pytorch, Tensorflow, or Keras
• Strong programming skills with proven experience crafting, prototyping, and delivering advanced algorithmic solutions;
• Creative, collaborative, and innovation focused

Benefits

Wizard offers (i) competitive compensation packages, including salary and equity, (ii) flexibility for hybrid and remote work based on role; and (iii) an environment to learn and grow, and the autonomy to do your best work and succeed.

Wizard is committed to building the best team and strongly believes that fair hiring practices will help us achieve our goals. We advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion because it's not only the right thing to do, but also creates a positive work culture and stronger outcomes. Wizard does not discriminate or make decisions based on race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, marital status, disability or any other protected class(es). If you have a disability please let our recruiting team know how we can make the interview process work for you.