Sr. Software Engineer, AI, Machine learning, NLP

_Contact_:
If you have questions about this position, please contact: nkrishna@amazon.com , Req number: 148174

Senior Software Engineer - Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, NLP

Does converting semi-structured or un-structured data into structured information interest you? Do you like taking on new challenges and exploring new frontiers in product search? Are you interested in analyzing vast amounts of data in pursuit of algorithms that make a significant impact to the bottom line?

Amazon's Search and Browse Experience team is looking for talented and creative engineers to staff its newly created Scalable Faceted Search program. Our goal is to enhance the customer experience by automatically detecting product features from Amazon's semi-structured product catalog, grouping them into facets and labelling those facets with semantics. For example, for lawn mowers, the "Power Source" facet will contain features such as "corded electric", "battery operated", "gas powered" and "manual".

This problem is made complex by the fact there are many thousands of types of products for sale in the catalog which necessitates the development of product type agnostic algorithms. Other problems include the ranking of these facets by their utility to our customers and measuring the impact of Faceted Search on both the customer experience and the business.

This is a great time to join our team as we are poised to tackle complex information extraction challenges and build new systems that further enhance customer experience on Amazon. Our vision is to provide an accurate and comprehensive faceted search experience for all Amazon websites around the world by using algorithms and heuristics from Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Data Mining and Machine Learning.

As a developer on this team, you will have the opportunity to:

1. Analyze vast amounts of data from various internal and external data sources such as Amazon.com's product catalog, search query logs, Wikipedia and Freebase and use your creativity to come up with ideas to extract, group and label features automatically.

2. Identify areas of improvement in our frameworks, tools, processes and strive to make them better. Evaluate our success metrics and evolve our reporting systems.

3. Work with the User Experience team to experiment with with various treatments on the website and determine an optimal faceted search experience.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Math or related field with 6+ years of experience
• Experience with building high-performance, highly-available and scalable distributed systems
• Fundamentals in design and coding skills in Java/C++ on Unix Platforms
• Familiar with Perl or Python and have an understanding of SQL

• Masters or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Math or related field
• Past experience in at least one of the following areas: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing or Data Mining.
• Desire to analyze data while developing solutions to problems.
• Be highly innovative, flexible and self-directed
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Fluency in written French, German, or Japanese is a plus.