Senior NLP Engineer Wayfair
Boston, MA

Job Description

Who we are:

Search Technologies is a highly impactful team at Wayfair who are looking for NLP/IR Engineers. We build fast, reliable and powerful customer-facing search systems across all Wayfair platforms. Our infrastructure provides the most enjoyable browsing and shopping experience for our customers and partners. Search Technologies is very collaborative, as we partner with storefront and app teams, data science, infrastructure teams and operational engineering teams to create a holistic search experience for Wayfair's customers.

This team develops and maintains all the back-end systems that a customer interacts with when they click into the search bar on Wayfair's sites. We use Natural Language Processing techniques and human-computer interaction techniques to develop systems that can understand customer intent from a variety of available signals. From there, we partner with our analytics and data science teams to provide meaningful product results to customers through a variety of approaches and tools, including machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

What you'll do:

* Create and maintain systems that interpret customer text searches, providing meaningful navigation responses to our storefront applications.
* Develop and improve relevance in our primary product search Solr collections by partnering with Data Science, Site Merchandising and other teams to provide relevant results to customers.
* Leverage Natural Language Processing techniques to build better semantic understanding of customer intent and searches.
* Create Big Data and Machine Learning pipelines to augment and enhance search experience by providing search suggestions, allowing for expanded personalization, and enriching search relevance.
* Create new capabilities for improved customer experience by providing Search capabilities for front-end teams to quickly and efficiently traverse the Wayfair catalog of products, customer reviews and other text-heavy data-sources.

What you'll need:

* A graduate of a computer science, mathematics, engineering or physical science related degree program with 4+ years of relevant industry experience OR have 6+ years of relevant industry experience
* Python or Java experience preferred
* Experience with Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval
* Experience with Lucene-based search engines like Solr or Elasticsearch
* Experience in relational database (MS SQL or similar) schema design, optimization and architecture
* Experience using Docker, Kubernetes or other containerization technologies is a plus
* A continuous drive to explore, enhance, automate and optimize distributed systems
* Ability to work creatively and problem solve independently
* Comfortable working in a collaborative, fast-paced and dynamic work environment
* Expertise in algorithms and data structures
* Experience with large-scale data processing and design of distributed systems.
* Experience with streaming technologies like Spark, Storm, Kafka, etc are a plus