Research Engineer(Jr - Sr, Principal)

At MeetKai we are building a next generation voice assistant. We are looking to bring on research engineers in the fields of speech, language understanding, search and personalization to leapfrog over the competition.

Status: Full Time

Job Title: Jr Research Engineer, Research Engineer, Sr Research Engineer, Principal Research Engineer

Compensation: Competitive Salary + Equity for qualified candidates

Location: This position can be done remotely during the pandemic, but ideally the candidate would be in Northern or Southern California, or willing to relocate, once MeetKai’s offices open back up.

MeetKai is a cutting-edge AI startup focused on human-device interaction. Founded in 2018 by Weili Dai and James Kaplan, MeetKai is well financed and scaling quickly. We have a core team of 14 and looking to (at least) double by the end of the year. We have offices (currently closed) in Santa Clara and Marina Del Rey. We have a woman-majority board, and most of our business and prospective business is international.

Your will be expected to:

• Keep track of the literature and progress in the field — if something new comes out we want you to be the first to know it.

• Implement academic papers and maintain benchmarks of internal solutions.

• Be able to carry out original work — you will often be given problems that do not have a set of GitHub repos that can be stitched together.

• Be scrappy about your datasets. Not every task will have a baseline dataset to train with.

• Write code that can actually run in production. While research projects may start out as PoCs the end goal is not to have a benchmark and a command line script, but rather an actual deployed solution. You should feel comfortable taking the research from the conception to the deployment.

• Be able to carry out model deployment into systems of different scales — these could be mobile devices, IoT devices, arm servers, x86 servers, or GPU servers.

• Monitor production performance of projects and use that to improve models.

• Be open to writing papers/posts rather than just code.

• And most importantly, come up with product ideas! The best product is one where the most people touch it, we are looking for people with diverse view points to bring those to play here and contribute to the product.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of general programming experience

• High level of comfort in Python

• Experience in building Deep Learning models in a modern framework (ideally PyTorch or TF).

• Expertise in at least one of these fields:
  • Search
  • Personalization
  • Speech
  • Language

• Either a Masters or PhD in the field, publications, or the ability to give real examples of research projects you have carried out successfully.

• Extreme attention to detail

• Experience in management of more junior researchers or interns is a plus

• Speaking multiple languages is a major plus.