Senior Researcher Microsoft
Berkeley, CA

Job Description

Semantic Machines is hiring a few extremely talented researchers to join our world-class team in Boston, MA, Bellevue, WA, and Berkeley, CA. Our team has advanced the state of the art in natural language processing, speech processing, deep learning, video game AI, and even computational historical linguistics. We're looking for folks who are smart, passionate, productive, and kind to join in our ambitious project. You will be part of an ambitious plan to reshape human-computer interaction with conversational AI. We believe that the current prevailing approaches to dialogue systems are insufficient to carry out a natural, flowing conversation.

We are going to fix this.

We're looking for experienced research scientists and top graduate students / post-docs with:

* experience building large, production-quality NLP, speech, or deep learning systems,
* strong software engineering and interpersonal skills,
* a track record of publication in top-tier conferences or other evidence of significant contributions to this or a related field,
* a proven ability and desire to spin up quickly on new topics and techniques
* and a commitment to seeing an idea from conception and prototyping through to deployment and production.

A PhD is highly desirable, but others with equivalent experience are invited to apply. We are doing incredible work that will reshape research in dialogue systems, and we are committed to sharing that work with the community. You can expect to continue to publish the results of your research if you like.

Tools

We're a small group and want to use the right tools for each project. Experience in the languages & systems we're using is an asset but not a requirement; perhaps you will bring new ideas and help improve the way we work. We are currently writing in Scala/Java, Python, Typescript, and C++.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

We are working on the entire dialogue "stack:" from speech recognition and analysis to dialogue state management, generation, and speech synthesis. You will work on problems related to data capture, modeling, learning, and decoding within and across the major components of our system. Because our team is small, a desire to tackle problems at every level is a huge plus.