Data Scientist, Quality

About Amira Learning:

We believe every child deserves the chance to become a reader. We seek to help more students learn how to read than any other company in the world. Amira is a rapidly growing and renowned AI startup that was recently named by Business Insider as one of 30 startups to bet your career on. The company is the only education company in the Forbes Top 50 AI Companies, was a Time Magazine Best Invention of 2021, has been featured in the NY Times, selected as the “Future of Education” by the Wall Street Journal, won dozens of awards for software excellence, and has exploded into schools across the country.

Amira is the first, most widely used, and most effective AI-powered reading tutor. Amira is able to listen to young children read out loud, assess their mastery and deliver 1:1 personalized tutoring. Amira is a breakthrough innovation having a real impact on kids’ lives and societal equity. In independent testing done by State Education Agencies, Amira is the only edtech for reading that has proven effective. It is in use in schools in all 50 states and across 16 countries.

About this role:

We are seeking a self-motivated and detail-oriented Data Scientist or ML Scientist with an orientation towards quality and practical experience understanding and evaluating state-of-the-art AI systems and model results. This position requires an individual with strong problem solving and communication skills, a strong conceptual grasp of how machine learning models behave, and the interest and willingness to work in a sophisticated production environment.
Who You Are:

• You have a strong academic background that demonstrates that you are a highly motivated, fast learner with a bias to action.
• You have a degree in computer science or a related technical area, or a subject-matter related degree such as computational linguistics or neuroscience.
• You have experience interpreting statistical results and comfortable evaluating the validity of key customer-facing metrics. 
• You are a competent Python programmer.
• You are an extremely hard worker with an ambition to become an expert in machine learning models.
• You love thinking about edge cases and failure points – creating a robust product means a lot to you.
• You are comfortable juggling responsibilities across multiple different features and products and enjoy having a diverse set of day-to-day tasks.
• You have a detail-oriented personality but feel comfortable with making educated, critical judgments.
• You have good verbal and written communication skills. You can describe the detailed processes that lead to a successful bug report and be able to communicate successes and risks through regular updates. 
• You want to be at a Silicon Valley start-up, with the dedication and commitment that requires.
• You are able to enjoy working on a remote, distributed team and are a natural collaborator.
• Shipping your work and creating good products means a lot to you.
• Working is fun – not a passport to get to the next weekend.

What You’ll Do:

• Working with data scientists and psychometricians to understand model behavior, to interpret quantitative results, and to generate and execute test plans that help to expose quality issues as well as to understand model strengths and weaknesses.
• Developing and implementing quality workflow pipelines.
• Monitoring model behavior (for drift, distributional shift, etc.) at scale.
• Investigating code and results to find root causes of software and model behavior deficiencies.
• Ensure that models readily generalize to background noise, multiple speakers, and a large variety of accents, dialects, and environments.
• Contribute conceptually and in supporting roles to ML projects involving speech recognition, LLMs, generative AI, and bayesian models.
• Work within a distributed team.
• Create experiments and prototype implementations of new learning algorithms and prediction techniques.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, and/or relevant experience
• Proficient in Python.
• Experience with SQL queries and/or database manipulation
• Experience working in AWS and with AWS services (e.g. logs, dashboards)
• Ability to operate in a highly efficient manner in a fast-paced, goal-oriented environment.
• Exceptional organizational, analytical, and detail-oriented thinking skills.
• Proven track record of exceeding goals and targets.
• Great interpersonal, written and oral communication skills.
• Experience working across remote teams.

Amira’s Culture

• Flexibility – We encourage and support you to live and work where you desire. Amira works as a truly distributed team. We worked remotely before COVID and we’ll be working remotely after the pandemic is long gone. Our office is Slack. Our coffee room is Zoom. Our team works hard but we work when we want, where we want.
• Collaboration – We work together closely, using collaborative tools and periodic face to face get togethers. We believe great software is like movie-making. Lots of talented people with very different skills have to band together to build a great experience.
• Lean & Agile -- We believe in ownership and continuous feedback. Yes, we employ Scrum ceremonies. But, what we’re really after is using data and learning to be better and to do better for our teachers, students, and players.
• Mission-Driven – What’s important to us is helping kids. We’re about tangible, measured impact.

Amira Learning is proud to celebrate diversity and is committed to building an inclusive workplace regardless of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, age, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.

At Amira, we believe every child deserves the chance to become a reader. Join us to make that happen.