Research Scientist

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Job description

Job Description:

SUMMARY:

The Research Scientist will be working with other Research Scientists at all levels who are part of Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT), Boston to collaborate on global projects in a friendly but agile work environment. RIT is the corporate R&D department of the Rakuten group and is responsible for leading strategic technological progress. The Research Scientist should have strong expertise in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) and/or in the field of image captioning. The Research Scientist should have done original research during his/her doctoral tenure with a focus on depth and improving the former State-of-the-art rather than breadth of research. The Research Scientist will primarily be tasked with understanding and improving existing production systems with AI solutions based on State-of-the-art ML algorithms and Deep Neural Networks with a focus on converting new innovations into top tier conference papers.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Propose new research in NLP and/or algorithms (for instance, new neural architectures in deep learning for NLP) on product data. Create core components for our services: Conduct research on sequence prediction models for NLP, large-scale language models, large-scale hierarchical classification models, query generation from documents, and deep learning methods for product text understanding. Contribute to building large-scale NLP pipeline frameworks for training ML algorithms and deployment of NLP and ML models as services for business units to consume. Contributing to research dissemination, including organizing workshops and/or data challenges in top tier conferences. Quickly implement/adapt new State-of-the-art models for in-house datasets and present conclusions to upper management. Publishing research in top tier NLP and ML conferences.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities)

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Strong background and hands on experience in natural language processing, specifically in language analysis technologies, e.g., word segmentation, word embeddings, PoS tagging, named entity recognition, parsing, or machine translation.
• Practical knowledge of Deep Learning (DL) based pre-trained neural language models such as BERT, ROBERTa, ALBERT, etc.
• Familiarity with SOTA open source NLP and ML/DL software.
• Familiarity with Git.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or C/C++/Java and strong algorithmic skills.
• Academic publications in top-tier peer-reviewed international conferences/journals on NLP such as NAACL-HLT, ACL, EACL, EMNLP, CoNLL, COLING, NIST Tracks in NLP and further publications in SIGIR, WWW (Web), WSDM, KDD, CIKM, ICML, NeuRIPS, JMLR, AAAI, IJCAI, AISTATS, ICLR, UAI, COLT, ICDM, etc. will be considered as bonus.

QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS

• PhD in Computer Science
• Years of Industry Experience outside of academia: 1-3 years.

RAKUTEN SHUGI PRINCIPLES

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

• Always improve, always advance. Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen.
• Be passionately professional. Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best.
• Hypothesize - Practice - Validate - Shikumika. Use the Rakuten Cycle to success in unknown territory.
• Maximize Customer Satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction for workers in a service industry is to see their customers smile.
• Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! Always be conscious of time. Take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team.