Lead Machine Learning Support Engineer

The power of prediction starts with Heartex. We build software that helps people do what only they can do – give meaning

Data fills our modern world. It flows prolifically inside organizations, customer interactions, through product usage, environmental research, healthcare imaging, and beyond. What if we could use any of that historical data to predict the future? The fact is, in most cases we can make predictions through Machine Learning and AI, but to do so in a meaningful and impactful way, historical data needs to be accurate, comprehensive, and absent of bias. 

In order to make the best predictions, we believe internal teams with domain expertise should be responsible for annotating and curating data. It's called data labeling, and it’s a process of real people giving meaning to the information they see on the screen. Heartex was founded to take data labeling to the next level. 

We believe that data labeling is a team sport. Data scientists, subject matter experts, engineers, operations, and annotators must work collaboratively to ensure quality results and an efficient process. That’s why we created Label Studio, which has quickly become the most popular open source data labeling platform with 1,000,000 users around the world, alongside a community of thousands of data scientists sharing knowledge and working to advance data-centric AI.  

We are excited to announce that Heartex has recently raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing our total funds raised to $30 million from notable investment partners Redpoint Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Bow Capital, Swift Ventures, as well as angel investors.

Heartex is a fully distributed organization with people all over the world. We have team members in North America, Europe, and South America across 6 countries.

About the Opportunity:

Support is a key function at Heartex. We deeply value the relationships we build with our customers, users, and community. Building trusting long lasting relationships is often based on how quickly we respond and the quality of the solutions we provide our users.

Working hand in hand with stakeholders across engineering, sales, and other teams this role will play a lead role in the support function. This is a highly technical hands on role that will help craft our technical support foundation for both our enterprise and open source product. In addition to assisting the growth of the support function this role will work on a very diverse set of problems, from deployment through configuration of data labeling projects. Externally your main focus will be our Enterprise customers, however this role also works closely with members of the product engineering team, product management,  customer success, and other internal teams. The goal of this role is to provide quality solutions to our enterprise customers throughout the use of the product. A big focus in this is to troubleshoot our Enterprise product offering. Issues could include easy updates to very complex technical issues involving escalation to product engineering.

The ideal candidate for this role has empathy for the user and enjoys helping customers. You are comfortable working with highly technical users and enjoy the challenge of solving a wide range of technical issues. You know when to escalate a problem and who to go to.

About the Opportunity:

• Strategically and tactically help build a more formalized support function that will scale with our growing customer base
• Review and answer all technical questions regarding Label Studio Enterprise (LSE)
• Respond to all inbound support tickets, emails, and slacks from customers
• Triage bugs and requests based on customer type and severity of the issue
• Track inbound and outbound responses to ensure contact SLAs are being met
• Maintain a fast response time for an entire user base
• Work directly with the core development team when troubleshooting issues
• Become a product expert and document your knowledge into a readable format

What You'll Bring:

• Empathy towards the users and their problems
• You bring some prior experience leading staff & strategic initiatives or projects
• An understanding how an early stage startup efficiently builds a support function that scales as the organization grows
• You are very comfortable troubleshooting software across the stack from backend to frontend, a huge plus if you have experience debugging
• Some programming and DevOps experience, you need to be very comfortable with the terminal, being able to start, configure and deploy software
• Ability to launch and troubleshoot docker packages
• Ability to write clear and concise documentation of bug reports/feature requests
• Proactively find ways to improve internal development processes and collaboration
• You're a self-starter, can work autonomously in a self-directed environment
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• A technical understanding of the following:
  • large-scale distributed applications
  • You can read, understand, and modify Python & Javascript code
  • System monitoring and management tools (such as: DataDog, Grafana, Confluence, Loggly, PagerDuty, AWS CloudWatch, or Splunk)
  • Helm, Docker, Terraform, and general containerization of microservices
  • CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions or CircleCI
  • Some understanding of Kustomize, Jsonnet, or Kubernetes is a plus
• Any Machine Learning experience is a HUGE bonus

In 1 month

• Take a deep dive into LSE to understand how the application works in detail
• Learn how to install and configure LSE, both on-premise and SaaS
• Attend customer meetings to understand their pain points and help with finding solutions
• Answer basic usage questions for OSS and Enterprise customers
• Learn who to escalate issues to if you cannot resolve them yourself

In 3 months

• Join customer onboarding meetings to understand customer deployment needs
• Help on-prem customers plan their deployments given their environmental constraints
• Help SaaS customers with configuration of their instances
• Update/Create documentation to make deployment/configuration easier for customers
• Learn about the internal ML algorithms in order to advise customers
• Work with customers to identify and debug product issues. This will, at times, require the support engineer to dive into the LSE source code
• Play a lead role in managing the day to day function of support and support staff
• Help drive any needed support hiring

In 6 months

• Build tools that will help in debugging and resolving customer issues
• Build/Integrate with tools that help manage communication with customers
• Work with Engineering to improve the installation and configuration of LSE
• Work with Customer Success in the creation of a Knowledge Base that answers questions around product usage / issue resolution
• Work with Product to get customer issues prioritized

In 1 year

• Build internal dashboards that give us customer health status. Soon we will have too many customers to be able to follow their status in our heads. We need to be alerted when something is about to go wrong so we can be proactive instead of reactive.
• Work with Sales to build tools/dashboards that predict customer churn probability so we can reach out proactively.
• Debug and fix small to medium product issues (beyond implementation / configuration)
• Continue to be a Customer Advocate, pushing for quick resolution to critical issues and feature requests

It is an exciting time at Heartex, we are a growing startup and at this stage we are constantly evolving. While we have put a lot of thought into your first and most important initiatives, it’s only an example and something we will work on together. We're always learning and growing, so like us this role will evolve and expand. We hope that this opportunity sounds exciting to you and that you consider joining us on our journey!

At Heartex

While our community and customers enjoy our products, we understand it is our team who make that possible. That is why we want to support you in doing your best work. To explore more about our team please visit the about our team page. 

We hope you are interested in our opportunities and encourage you to apply even if you are not sure you fit all of the requirements. When applying please include: A short document covering of your experience & skills, such as a resume or linkedin profile. If you have a cover letter expanding on your background and why Heartex is of interest to you, even better, though a cover letter is not required & will not impact your application status. When we receive your application, we’ll get back to you about the next steps.

Heartex is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building an organization that welcomes diverse backgrounds and lifestyles. Our goal is to create an inclusive work environment that is equitable and where everyone feels they belong. We foster open and transparent communication and a workplace where discrimination and harassment are not tolerated. If you need any accommodations or assistance to make your interviews more accessible please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

We do not discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, race, military/veteran status, citizenship, pregnancy status, or any other differences.