Research Engineer - Search

Company: Chomp
Location: San Francisco, CA
Web: www.chomp.com

Chomp is an app discovery product that helps users find the best mobile apps. It combines a unique search engine that lets you search for apps based on what they do rather than what they're called, with intelligent recommendations based on your browsing and purchase history. We're solving some really challenging problems in information retrieval, natural language processing and machine learning.

Apple is currently seeing more than 1 billion apps being downloaded on iPhone & iPod touch every 60 days. As a result, we think that what we are building is going to be an incredibly important product for the future of app discovery not just on iPhone but on all app platforms that matter. If you want to try Chomp out, please download it from the iPhone app store. Chomp is backed by top tier Silicon Valley VC's and has assembled a killer team coming from companies such as Google, Yahoo, Yelp and Admob.

Job Description

Responsibilities:

• leading research and development of the scoring/ranking component of the Chomp search engine
• identifying factors to input into the scoring component and determining the weighting for each factor
• collaborating with search engineer to implement new scoring algorithms into production system
• determining and collecting sources of training data to train weighting of factors (e.g. Mechanical Turk)
• ability to work in areas outside of their usual comfort zone and get things done quickly

• experience of using Java in a production environment
• experience of implementing scoring/ranking algorithms for a search engine (highly desirable)
• PhD or Masters in Information Retrieval