Software Development Engineer - Machine Learning, NLP, AI

"Alexa, which energy bar has the fewest carbohydrates?"

If you ask Amazon’s Alexa a question about healthy foods like the one above, we might actually be the team who answers you! Over the past year, our small group of engineers and scientists have trained hundreds of machine learning models to write billions of words and sentences into the Amazon catalog. In fact, if you have ever opened any product page in Amazon, it's likely that you have read a sentence written by us. With an ever changing catalog with millions of new and revised products daily, we are still getting started.

As an engineer, you'll be part of a close-knit team of software engineers, applied scientists, and product managers who innovate on customer experiences in an agile and highly collaborative manner. You will train models with hundreds of million of training samples, evaluate them with hundreds of human language experts, and predict product facts from billions of product details (title, product descriptions, product image etc.) in 15 different languages. You will deploy models using AWS technologies and cutting edge science techniques. These models are deployed using AWS Sagemaker containers, which enables us to scale and leverage our work across retail and the impact of your work will be visible on the Amazon website. In addition to technical strategy, you will also influence our business strategy, and play a key role in defining the team’s roadmap.

A successful candidate will have an established background in large scale software systems, strong technical ability, great communication skills, and motivation to solve new, ambiguous problems.

Unique Opportunities
· Learn state of the art engineering and science techniques- Scientists and engineers work closely together, giving you the chance to learn new skills.
· Global impact on hundreds of millions of Amazon customers means your career has high impact and opportunities to grow to the next level
Sample of the problems that the team is working on include:
· How can we automatically discover new diets, and show our customers customized experiences for gluten free, or keto friendly, protein bars?
· When the world faces a shortage of paper towels, how do we ensure our customers can always find the best price items?
· How do we use product images to help customers find the best dress for any occasion?
· When searching for “apple case” do you mean a cell-phone case compatible with an iPhone or a crate of apples?
· How can we identify the sleeve type of dresses in Amazon from its product image?
· Which cell-phone case is the most durable, ultra-thin and the best value for my money?
Responsibilities:
· Build scalable, efficient, and automated knowledge discovery systems
· Analyze and process large amounts of to extract valuable information from various sources (e.g. product catalog, search query etc.)
· Actively participate in idea and roadmap generation
· Work creatively through and around perceived limitations and/or challenges imposed by the delivery platform to enable delightful experiences for customers
· Effectively present work to all levels of the leadership
· Be an effective collaborator in a cross functional team of SDEs, Applied Scientists, Technical Program Managers, and Product Managers

Basic Qualifications

· Programming experience with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
· Bachelor's degree in computer science related fields OR 1+ years equivalent experience in software development
· Bachelors in Computer science or related field.
· Atleast 1+yrs experience in fast pace agile environment to deliver high quality software against aggresive schedules
· Strong OO analysis, design, development skills in Java and Scala
· Strong verbal and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

· Advanced post graduate degrees (M.S., Ph.D.) in Computer Science or a related field
· Strong customer focus, ownership, urgency, and drive
· Experience building large-scale applications
· Expertise in delivering high­ quality, innovative applications.
· Optimizing current products to improve its performance and usability.
· Experience with AWS offerings or their equivalents (S3, EMR, Spark, DynamoDB, SWF)
· Experience in machine learning, data mining, artificial intelligence or statistics
· Excellent written and verbal communication.

Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation