Position: Technical Lead for NLP / Conversational Systems
Company: Grid Dynamics
Category: Lead
Experience required: 5y
English level: fluent
Published: 2020-05-01T00:00:00+03:00

Core responsibilities combine hands-on leadership of customer engagements related to the design and implementation of custom conversational platforms including various digital assistants & advanced NLP/voice applications, along with internal research designed to stay abreast of the rapidly evolving field of data science applications for conversational systems. Assistance with technical marketing and sales, including blog posts, conference talks and proposal preparations is also common, along with frequent trips to the customer site in the USA and Europe. 

Since Conversational systems is a new and emerging field, we are looking for experienced technologists with passion for data science that are interested in focusing on this field for a long haul. We will consider candidates with comparable experience in other areas of data science with some NLP experience, as long as they have an open mind, ability to learn new disciplines quickly and strong interest in NLP. 

Building conversational systems typically involves:

- Design and development of scalable dialogue systems consisting of many components and services;
- Work on various NLP problems, applying both classic Machine Learning and - Deep Learning (word2vec, CNN, LSTM, Transformers) approaches;
- Solving common NLP problems, such as dialogue management, intent classification, NER, question answering, semantic search, and more.
- Collect, clean, process and analyse new and existing data sources;
- Obtain training datasets, often using scrawling or building it from scratch;
- Support contextual conversations;
- Adapt NLU models to a new domain;
- Design flexible architecture for multi-channel & multi-agent solutions;
- Build the testing process for such kinds of systems;
- Integrate with existing enterprise services;
- Integrate with search, sql and other data retrieval systems;
- Read more in our blog.

Responsibilities:

- Continuously stay abreast of new developments in NLP technologies, tools and applications through reading, experimentation, R&D projects and customer engagements;
- Lead small to medium-size engineering teams working on customer engagements to build conversational systems, applications and platform;
- Consult, educate and collaborate with customer’s managers, architects and data scientists on the proposals, designs, implementations and delivery;
- Participate or lead pre-sales efforts to win new engagements;
- Travel to customer site during critical phases of the project;
- Advise company’s executives on sales and marketing strategies related to conversational systems;
- Formulate and lead R&D projects that enhance our company’s competencies, develop reference architectures and blueprints for different use cases, or experiment with new technologies or business problems;
- Create internal training programs to scale expertise;
- Interview, engage, motivate and mentor engineers in the data science practice;  
- Write blog posts, white papers and case studies, and present at meetups and technical conferences.

Requirements:

- 8+ years of software development experience;
- 2+ years of ML / DS / AI systems experience;
- 3+ years of technical leadership experience, as architect and technical lead, with demonstrated track record leading technologically complex and innovative projects from inception to successful, large-scale implementation in mission-critical environments;
- Solid understanding of classical algorithms, data structures, and coding standards;
- Experience with NLP (word2vec, CNN, LSTM, Transformers) and conversational systems is highly preferred;
- Expertise in Python ecosystem, and Python-based ML tools and frameworks (familiar with PyTorch or TensorFlow);
- Understanding of modern CI/CD practices; experience with cloud providers (e.g. AWS, GCP, or Azure);
- Excellent verbal, written and visual communication skills, in English, directed at engineers, customers and internal management. Public speaking and blogging skills and / or interest to develop these skills is highly preferred;
- Strong design and architecture skills; 
- Ability to analyze complex requirements, formulate pragmatic approaches, identify risks, propose solutions and present your ideas in a winning way;
- Be collaborative, communicative, open to new ideas, non-confrontational and supportive of colleagues, peers, collaborators, customers and management;
- Ability to travel to the US on business trips.

Desired soft skill:

- Highly motivated in achieving high business value with technology;
- Excellent communication and organizational skills;
- Enjoy analyzing and solving problems;
- Be ready to take responsibility and deliver on the promise;
- Be able to communicate ideas in a clear and engaging way;
- Be resourceful and creative in solving problems;
- Understand tactics and strategy in decision making;
- Be able to explain complex concepts in understandable terms.

We offer:

- High-performance culture of digital transformation leader;
- Work, learn, win and grow alongside brilliant and motivated colleagues; 
- Opportunity to work on bleeding-edge projects;
- Competitive salary;
- Trips to the US;
- Flexible schedule;
- Medical insurance;
- Benefits program;
- Corporate social events;
- Professional development opportunities.