Senior Machine Learning Engineer

News can change the world, save lives, and bring us all closer together through empathy and understanding - but not if it isn’t read. Out of the hundreds of millions of articles and posts, how do we deliver the information that matters the most? How do we avoid the filter bubble of personalization and widen people’s interests and knowledge?

Every day, SmartNews analyzes millions of URLs to deliver the top articles that matter in near-real time to millions of users around the world. Our AI Foundation team is responsible for researching and developing world-class AI algorithms that can be applied at large scale to accomplish our mission. Our team works on a range of content understanding, user modeling and recommendation problems, which include user embedding, user profiling, user clustering, natural language processing tasks of classification, entity recognition, summarization, computer vision tasks of image/video classification, recommendation tasks of retrieving and ranking for relevance, etc. The team provides important content/user signals and state-of-art recommendation models to the News Ranking/Ads Ranking team to deliver the world's high-quality information to the people who need it.

We’re not there yet, but we have a great head start. We’re one of the very few pre-IPO, (double) unicorns focused on the news with thousands of publisher partners globally. Founded in Tokyo in 2012, SmartNews has become the go-to source of news for users around the world. We have more than 20M+ monthly active users worldwide, billions of channel interactions, and article pageviews generated per month.

Join us and be a part of the solution as we work to escape the filter bubble, strengthen democracy, and help people be better informed.

Responsibilities

• Set technical and research directions for AI Foundation or and cross-team machine learning projects and able to lead its implementation
• The ability to solve important issues of AI Foundation team from fundamental algorithm development, implementation and optimization to deliver product metrics
• Lead cross-team projects to improve features/models that benefit company OKR
• Identify new directions for the team to be industry leading in areas of personalized discovery, feed recommendation and user understanding
• Develop toolings to make ML engineers to be more productive
• Be great mentor to other machine learning engineers

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in designing and implementing state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, and applying them to real world problems
• Industry leading expertise in certain domain of machine learning techniques, especially in deep learning, natural language processing, recommendation systems, computer visions
• Track record of successfully deliver improvement of features/models to production systems with high impact by working across teams and organizations
• Strong software development skills with proven record of shipping changes to production that improved product metrics with machine learning technologies
• Good written and spoken communication skills, can work across functional teams
• Strong coding skills in multiple programming languages (e.g. Python, Java, C++, Scala)

Nice to Haves

• Strong interest in news media and our mission
• Strong domain expertise in recommendation or graph algorithms
• Experience with cloud based architecture (e.g. Amazon Web Services)
• M.S or Ph.D in computer science, mathematics, physics or other quantitative fields

Benefits

• Equity included
• 100% medical, dental and vision insurance coverage (for self and family)
• 401(k) matching program
• Benefit plan with monthly allowances
• Free lunch, snacks, drinks at the office
• Pet friendly office