Sr.Linguistic Engineer

Overview

Smartling was founded over 15 years ago to make localization and translation seamless. Today, Smartling is profitable and backed by Battery Ventures, a global technology-focused investment firm, supporting company growth and expanding our market share and leadership position. We are the only cloud-based, AI-enabled translation platform that combines LanguageAI ™ suite of NLP tools and professional language services empowering teams to collaborate in real-time to create experiences customers love.

We are seeking a Senior Linguistic Engineer to join our team.  We are a small, tight-knit, dynamic group of data scientists and engineers building and maintaining various smart systems that our customers rely on to maximize their value in using our platform.  You will be responsible for tasks like identifying, improving, and designing next generation models and techniques for translation generation and translation quality assessment; staying current on relevant research and distilling knowledge back to the team; advising and designing systems with engineering and product to push our offerings to the next level.

It’s a great match for you if you love to solve hard problems. You will work directly with the Product, Engineering, and Language Services departments to solve our customers' problems with data models and work in the natural language space with billions of data points.

Our LanguageAI team approach

• Agile / Scrum, “fail fast” approach 
• Data-driven decisions

You Will

Create assets, models and pipelines for machine learning models:

• Research and understand linguistic characteristics of various locales and languages around the world
• Understanding current metrics and recommending additional data points over linguistic data
• Pre-processing data via Python
• Feature engineering and model construction
• Model training and validation via various Python libraries
• Evaluating ML models once deployed
• Training with the team to help with best practices and knowledge sharing
• Engineer prompts, with and without fine-tuning, to work with state-of-the-art LLMs in the industry to transform and evaluate text for translation tasks
• Research novel industry and academia methodologies/approaches to improve the translation experience & improve translation quality at Smartling 
• File patents together with the team for the research projects that proved successful
• Collaborate with product/engineering team to build internal tooling for the end-to-end processes
• Advise other teams on the feasibility and practicality of AI/ML features to add to the Smartling platform

You Have

• 10+ years of linguistic engineering, computational linguistics, and / or language-based data science experience
• Expert level knowledge of general linguistics
• Created modern translation quality analysis systems
• Proficiency in data analysis and statistical methodologies
• Proficiency in Python
• Knowledge of data science techniques (sampling, feature engineering, modeling, etc)
• Knowledge of state-of-the-art NLP techniques
• Basic understanding of Notebooks and Terminals

Preferred but not required

• Bilingual or fluent in multiple languages
• Experience being a translator or working in the translation industry
• Experience with SQL and / or other query languages
• Experience with Looker and / or other BI tools
• Cloud stack experience: SageMaker, Athena, Spark, S3, etc

You are

• Curious.  The desire to learn new techniques, technologies, and frameworks
• Creative/Innovative. Demonstrate inventiveness and the ability to find information or solutions needed for assignments
• Autonomous/Self-started. Work well and achieve results with little or no supervision
• Team Player.  Willing to do PRs, give advice, and contribute to the team
• Problem Solver. Provide workable solutions or consults with secondary resources to devise solutions
• Adaptable. Maintain focus and positive attitude amidst change or under pressure
• With a “can-do attitude”. Able to roll up your sleeves and drive projects to their completion

You Will Enjoy

• Freedom 🏡- we are remote-first
• Growth - an opportunity to learn and advance your career
• Wealth 💰 - we offer a competitive compensation
• Wellness - location-based and contract-based benefits
• Balance - flexible PTO 
• Culture 🤝- an energetic, value-driven, and fun culture and team spirit
• Bonus - employee referral programs and Apple equipment

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building an inclusive global team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, beliefs, skills, and experiences.

*To work from home, you must have a strong internet connection, quiet space, and a professional (distraction and clutter-free) background.