NLP Software Engineer

Introduction
WatsonX Orders is an IBM Silicon Valley based technology group working on a world-class conversational AI system. Our mission is to deliver advanced solutions that address real-world needs in the quick service restaurant industry. We use state-of-the-art Machine Learning and related technologies to deliver a product that will help serve tens of millions of customers per day.

Your Role and Responsibilities

Your role:

We are looking for highly skilled Software Engineers to work on our cutting-edge Conversational AI system for the Drive-Thru. Our team uses linguistic expertise software engineering skills and data-driven approaches to solve complex Natural Language Understanding (NLU) Knowledge Representation (Ontology) Dialog Management and Natural Language Generation (NLG) problems.
This is a hands-on technical role where you will spend time designing coding and implementing software solutions for the NLP components at WatsonX Orders. You will also take ownership of the architecture and design of foundational parts of the NLP code to help us scale our product to multiple clients and languages.
Responsibilities:

• Partner with computational linguists machine learning experts and domain experts to improve the core functionality of our Conversational AI.
• Proactively identify opportunities to enhance system scalability reliability and performance through architectural enhancements and optimizations.
• Address technical debt performance bottlenecks and other quality issues through systematic testing and refactoring.
• Contribute to our work moving from an in-memory product database to a cloud-based solution for managing our Ontology data.
• Actively maintain standards and best practices at IBM WatsonX Orders including policy judgments about code style documentation and library use.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering
• 2+ years of professional experience in object-oriented programming languages such as Python Java C++
• 1+ years of professional experience with Git
• Strong communication skills in English
• History of fostering a positive and collaborative environment
• A demonstrated interest in acquiring new skills

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

• Professional experience with conversational AI (chatbots virtual assistants etc.)
• Experience deep diving into existing large-scale code bases gaining a comprehensive understanding of architecture design patterns and dependencies.
• Experience designing and implementing databases
• Experience working on Knowledge Representation for NLP Applications
• Graduate degree (MA/MS PhD) in Computer Science or related field
• Professional experience with Linux