Lead Research Engineer

Why this Role?

Actually change lives at an unprecedented scale: How often do you hear about apps that make people cry of joy? It is really for us a unique opportunity and privilege to be able to meaningfully improve the lives of 100,000s of people - and yet to still be at the very beginning of our mission!

Work with some of the best people in the world: We have an incredibly talented and passionate team that is a lot of fun to work with. We're still super small and have accomplished some things that were thought impossible!

Tackle our most interesting and impactful problems: Our AI team is still small, and people wear many hats. You'd jump between machine-learning models, infrastructure, internal tools, process — participating in every phase from inception to implementation. Absolutely no boredom.

Join us at an incredible time: We're well-funded and hit product-market fit, which gives us a huge green field to work with. You'd join at the perfect time to shape what we build and how we grow, so we can create a more inclusive world.

So what will you do as a Research Engineer at Ava?

• You'll own designing and scaling Ava's AI infrastructure, supporting mission-critical algorithms for our users.
• You’ll help improve the performance, reliability and monitoring of our cutting‑edge AI systems — such as improving the speed and responsiveness of our deep neural network.
• You’ll work with the AI team to build and maintain robust internal machine‑learning tools and processes with a focus on the data pipeline. Think of projects such as integrating supervised data at scale to our models, a critical project to improve the accuracy of Ava.
• You’ll own the deployment processes and best practices to ensure the coordination of the AI team internally and in coordination with Ava’s CTO.
• You’ll help find, vet and lead a team of data engineers and scientists to support the AI team goals.

Qualifications

• You have experience scaling production software and machine learning models. You’ve worked on a product experiencing rapid growth and understand what needs to be done to scale to the next level.
• You can readily learn most technologies as you go. To you, technologies are about tools and tradeoffs, not an ideology.
• You care about the strategic and business implications of anything you build. You’re not just going after cool stuff — you understand the balance between craft, speed, and the bottom line.
• You’ve spent meaningful time (3+ years) as an engineer or tech lead — or even better, you’ve managed a team before and have experience with agile development.
• Bonus: You’re fluent with NodeJS, Python, noSQL and React.
• Bonus: You have experience in building deep learning models, especially speech recognition and natural language processing systems.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.