Language Engineer (Computational Linguist)

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Alexa is the groundbreaking, cloud-based intelligent agent that powers Echo and other devices designed around your voice. Our team is creating the science and technology behind Alexa. Come join us! Our goal is to delight our customers by adding new features to Alexa and by improving the accuracy of our existing speech recognition and natural language processing systems.

As a Language Engineer, you will work with a team of linguists, research scientists, data specialists, and technical program managers. Our team is responsible for the natural language understanding models in two key feature domains, including both machine learning models and deterministic models. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of novel products and services that make use of speech and language technology.

Specifically, you will:
· Contribute to the design of new features by creating or extending annotation schemas,
· Design the natural language processing components of new Alexa experiences and features by authoring, testing, and debugging grammars and finite state transducers,
· Advocate strict adherence to annotation guidelines,
· Test and deploy changes to Alexa's natural language understanding codebase,
· Identify and solve production issues that are impacting the Alexa customer experience,
· Handle competing requests from a range of data customers,
· Collaborate with linguists, scientists and data associates in creating optimal solutions to elevate the customer experience,
· Own the customer-facing machine learning and deterministic models for specific features, and
· Use modeling tools to bootstrap and test new functionalities

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Either (a) 4+ years of experience in computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, or syntax, (b) 2+ years of experience in computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, or syntax and a masters degree in linguistics, computational linguistics, or a related field, or (c) a PhD in linguistics, computational linguistics, or a related field
· Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup
· Experience working with speech and text language data in multiple languages
· Experience with ontologies and other semantic meaning representation schemas
· Experience in Perl, Python or another scripting language
· Experience and comfort with the linux/unix command line interface
· Experience with machine learning or statistical language modeling