Language Engineer

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Are you a linguist with technical aptitude? Or are you an engineer with a passion for languages and linguistics? Come and join the Alexa Household Organization (HHO) which builds the speech and language solution behind Echo and other Amazon services, which make Alexa an ideal service to simplify life - helping families stay organized and connected to each other and making life run a little more smoothly. From setting timers while cooking to checking daily schedules and waking up to Alexa’s alarm tone, we help customers manage their time more easily using only their voice.

Alexa HHO is looking for a Language Engineer with experience in linguistic annotation, ontologies, taxonomies and/or semantic schemata. We are seeking a candidate with strong analytical skills to help us measure, analyze and solve complex language technology problems.

Specifically, the Language Engineer will:
· Measure and analyze accuracy and throughput of annotated data
· Contribute to the design of new features by extending existing annotation schemas to cover new areas
· Develop NLP components: Write grammars and build FSTs.
· Use modeling tools to bootstrap new functionalities
· Handle competing requests from a range of data customers
· Collaborate with other Language Engineers, Scientists and Data Specialists in data collection and feature design efforts

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· Experience in writing grammars and building Finite State Transducers (FSTs).
· Experience with statistical language modeling
· Comfortable working with speech and text language data in multiple languages
· Experience with ontologies, taxonomies, and other semantic meaning representation schemas
· Familiarity with data analysis processes (R, Matlab, etc.)
· Practical knowledge of version control and agile development
· Excellent communication, strong organizational skills and very detailed oriented
· Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
· Willingness to support several projects at one time, and to accept reprioritization as necessary

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelor's or higher degree in Computational Linguistics or a related field
· 2+ years of experience in computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, or syntax
· Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup
· Experience with database queries and data analysis processes, and Unix
· Experience programming in Perl, Python, or another scripting language