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From: Sheri Edwards <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Sheri Edwards <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2009 14:33:58 -0500
To: UTKSIS-L <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Job Posting: Software Development Manager with Information Retrieval Experience, Seattle WA

Job Description:
Software Development Manager with Information Retrieval Experience, Seattle WA
 
Amazon.com's 500M+ item catalog must be comprehensive and accurate so that we can relentlessly focus on making it easy for customers to discover products and make informed buying decisions. At the same time, we make it easy for hundreds of thousands of sellers to integrate their catalog data by asking for as little information as possible. These objectives aren't naturally complementary, but they do present opportunities for smart engineers to develop innovative techniques that make a real impact. One such technique, Fact Extraction, algorithmically derives structured product features such as brand name, color and size from semi-structured merchant catalog contributions. Structured product facts improve discoverability (search and browse) and product page quality. They also support other catalog quality initiatives such as detecting and removing duplicate pages on the website. This work is, therefore, central to providing Amazon.com shoppers with a world-class shopping experience.
Amazon.com's Fact Extraction (FX) team is looking for a technically strong and charismatic leader to manage a team of software developers tasked with improving the quality of our catalog. The FX team combines informational retrieval, data mining, knowledge representation, natural language processing and machine learning to solve named entity recognition problems at scale with high precision. In 2010, the team will develop new solutions that impact a broader list of categories, countries and languages. This work is critical to Amazon.com's global position as the premier product authority. The manager of the FX team will work closely with category teams and other software groups to prioritize requests and proactively identify and measure FX opportunities.
As manager of this team, you will be responsible for:
1. Developing and operating a production system that extracts structured information from unstructured text.
2. Measuring the impact of your work.
3. Reporting on key metrics to various stakeholders including business teams and senior management.
4. Working with other teams to develop and support new website features powered by the data your team generates.
4. Serving as a technical mentor to the engineers on your team.
5. Drawing on your experience in Information Retrieval and/or Text Analysis to make the right decisions.
6. Hiring and retaining top-notch engineers.
7. Motivating your team and leading by example.
The ideal candidate will have:
 1.An advanced degree in Computer Science, Math of related field.
2. 5+ years of industry experience in at least one of the following areas - Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Data Mining.
3. 2+ years experience as a solid individual contributor and 2 or more years as a tech lead/manager.
4. Led a team of 5+ developers working on problems in these areas.
5. Been a strong software engineer in the past with a record of developing large scale product-quality software systems.
6. Demonstrated the ability to be highly innovative.
7. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
8. Excellent project management skills.
9. A track record of setting goals for the team and achieving or exceeding them.
 
* This position does not provide International Relocation assistance.
Please send resume and cover letter to C.C. Scott ([log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]).
 
 


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