Applied Research Engineer

About this role

Applied Research takes work from the literature to something that survives production traffic — matching, ranking, document understanding and extraction quality.

Take promising approaches in matching and language understanding from paper to something that survives production traffic.

The problems are applied rather than open-ended. A method that improves an offline metric and degrades the live experience has not worked, and the team is expected to say so rather than publish the offline number.

Primary responsibilities

• Take research from the literature to something that survives production traffic
• Build the evaluation set before tuning anything, because without it you cannot tell improvement from noise
• Prototype quickly and be willing to conclude that an approach does not work
• Work on the applied problems the product has: matching, ranking, document understanding, and quality of extraction from a photographed CV
• Publish and present where it is appropriate to

Skills required

Day to day this role works with Python, Machine Learning and Research.

• Five or more years applying research to shipped products
• A postgraduate degree in a relevant field, or equivalent research experience
• Ability to read the literature and implement from a paper
• Strong engineering — research that runs in production, not only in a notebook
• Building an evaluation set before tuning anything
• Willingness to conclude that an approach does not work

Preferred