Tech Lead, Applied Machine Learning (News Ranking)
- Tokyo
- Partial Remote
- Full-time
- August 10, 2022
Responsibilities
Machine Learning Tech Leads are responsible to lead teams to tackle complex problems related to recommendation and optimization (search ranking, collaborative filtering, personalized recommendation, diversification, and more) and make a company-wide impact
- Play a critical role in setting the direction and goals for a global machine learning team, in terms of project impact, core-ranking system design, and machine learning excellence.
- Plan and execute engineering development of state-of-the-art core-ranking system to provide Personalized Discovery experience to millions of users around the world.
- Collaborate closely with Engineering and Product Leadership and global cross-functional teams to develop global product.
- Be a go-to person for software engineers to enhance systems related to news features (articles, pages, channels, search, etc) by developing complex algorithm and model architecture which will deepen the understanding of article contents as well as user behaviors to deliver high quality user experience and increase user engagement.
- Initiate and lead mid to large size projects.
- Mentor and coach other ML engineers in Japan and other regional offices.
Minimum Requirements
- Rich experience in hands-on developing the prediction, optimization, or other relevant systems for the online web service and products (e.g content recommendation, online advertisement, search optimization, etc).
- Experience in making company-wide business impact through machine learning, deep learning, or mathematical optimization (e.g achieving increase user's time-spent in the service, etc).
- Familiar with architecture and implementation mechanism of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (TensorFlow/Pytorch/MXNet/etc).
- Initiate and lead mid to large size projects.
- Experience of leading and mentoring engineers.
- BS degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Science (physics or mathematics) or other relevant majors
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with several of the following ML libraries: Tensorflow, xgboost, Keras, PyTorch, scikit-learn, pandas, numpy, etc.
- Knowledge of developing and debugging in Java and Spring-boot
- Experience with Hadoop/Hive/Spark/Flink/AWS
- Business-level proficiency in English
Perks and Benefits at the SmartNews Tokyo Office
- Support program for employee’s self-development and well-being
- Healthy lunches are prepared on-site daily in our SmartKitchen, located in our West Office building. You can even see the cooks at work!
- Need a pick-me-up? Stop by ChikyuCoffee, our in-house coffee shop located in both the East and West Office buildings, and get a cup of gourmet coffee, espresso-based beverage, or other seasonal drink!
- SmartNews provides all healthcare and social insurance benefits required by Japanese labor law
Visa Sponsorship and Relocation Support
For candidates who meet eligibility requirements, SmartNews can sponsor visas.
To support a smooth transition for candidates who are moving to Japan from overseas, SmartNews partners with a travel service provider.
About SmartNews
News can change the world, save lives, and bring us all closer together through empathy and understanding—but not if no one reads it. Out of the hundreds of millions of articles and posts, how do we deliver the information that matters the most?
Founded in 2012 in Tokyo, Japan, SmartNews is a leading global information and news discovery company dedicated to delivering quality information to the people who need it. We provide news that matters to millions of users thanks to our unique machine learning technology and relationships with over 3,000 global publisher partners. Our SmartNews app, available on iOS and Android, is already used in over 150 countries worldwide.
But we’re only just getting started, and that’s why we need someone like you.
Machine learning on news ranking is crucial for analyzing millions of articles every day to deliver the most engaging high-quality information in near-real-time while providing a "Personalized Discovery" experience to our users.
About Our Engineering Culture
Our engineers come from variety of backgrounds, from large, well-established companies to small ventures. We believe that employees with diverse sets of skills working together make for strong, cohesive teams.
About SmartNews
Recently crowned Japan's latest tech unicorn, this company runs a wildly successful news service that’s powered by machine learning. It's an engineering-focused company (One of co-founders is an engineer) and they have offices in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Shanghai, Beijing that are apparently doing quite well too.
The mission of SmartNews is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. Since its inception in 2012, the SmartNews app has been downloaded over 50 million downloads and maintained a monthly active user count of over 20 million.
In addition to being one of the most popular smartphone apps in Japan, SmartNews has worked hard on building their business in the US. They now have partnerships with over 300 major news publications in the US like CBS, Entertainment Weekly, Business Insider, National Geographic and more. They’ve had a great deal of success due to their ML-based sorting and recommendation systems.
SmartNews has a highly diverse development team with many world-class engineers and others working from their offices in Japan,China and the US. They maintain a very strict hiring bar for technical hires and an engineering-driven culture that makes them one of the strongest tech companies in Japan when it comes to technical skill level.
SmartNews is looking to hire the best people regardless of background, so they’re willing to hire people that don’t speak Japanese and (under normal circumstances) bring them to Japan from overseas if necessary. Everyone works together as one team regardless of location, and SmartNews provides everything their employees need to do their best work and maintains a Silicon Valley-inspired culture for engineers in Tokyo.
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