SigOpt | Research Engineer | Onsite San Francisco, CA | Fulltime
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SigOpt provides an enterprise, hosted service for model development and black box optimization.  We're looking for brilliant and enthusiastic researchers to learn, grow, and build with us!
Research at SigOpt
SigOpt is a service that helps customers efficiently develop effective models in an efficient and data-secure fashion.  As customers report the relationship between our recommended model designs and the associated performance, we implement algorithms internally to interpret this relationship and suggest new model designs that may reach higher performance.  Our algorithms must be able to perform under various customer circumstances and computational restrictions, and they must yield robust performance for our customers to trust their model development to SigOpt.
Project Ownership: Research engineers are entrusted to own much of the development process for many of our most important and differentiating features.  These critical elements of our product require the passion and rigor which defines a research mentality, and research engineers are expected to design and execute (in conjunction with other engineers) the strategies for designing and executing these key projects.
Working at the Cutting Edge: The tools that we provide for our customers must be based on the latest research developments from throughout the mathematics, statistics and machine learning communities.  We invest time in reading articles and participating in conferences to know the current state of the community so that we can bring the best tools to bear on our customer’s problems.  Research engineers have the important job of developing and/or adapting these strategies to fit in the constraints of an enterprise SaaS black-box solution.
Teamwork: Everyone on the research team has their own expertise and perspective on the research community: statistics, mathematics, operations research and machine learning all contribute to the core of our product.  We want all researcher engineers to be both humble teachers and active learners to build the best and most comprehensive team possible. The research team also regularly hosts interns, and interested team members have the opportunity to mentor the next generation of researchers.
Communicating to the World: One of the key ways the research team contributes at SigOpt is by being effective communicators.  This can be by documenting our work internally, developing feature/product documentation which speaks to advanced users, developing educational material to bolster SigOpt’s conference presence, writing blog content to present ideas/methodologies to the broad community, or writing articles for conferences/workshops to the research community.  We also regularly collaborate with external partners on projects ranging from materials science to artwork.
User Engagement:  An important part of SigOpt’s effectiveness lies in understanding our customer’s needs and values.  Research engineers are encouraged to spend time with the customer success team during customer meetings to better empathize with customer goals and devise better strategies for serving their needs.  This opportunity is unique to life at a small company, and, when successfully executed, this can be the most important element of product discovery/development.