Amazon Core Search Organization - Language Engineer, Core Search

Amazon • Seattle, WA

28d

About The Position

We are the MIDAS team within the Amazon Search organization. We own the
end-to-end human annotation requirements for our product partners. This is an
opportunity to join a high-performing team that helps customers worldwide find
and discover the best products, meet their personalized needs with the right
product details, and receive comparisons, recommendations, and more on Amazon.
This role is high-visibility and highly cross-functional, requiring
collaboration and influence across global product, design, science, operations,
and engineering teams.

We are looking for a Language Engineer to join MIDAS to write intuitive,
labeler-friendly annotation guidelines that enable measurement of search
quality, support data wrangling and analysis, define specifications for labeling
UI templates, and report labeled-data quality metrics to deliver on stakeholder
requirements and improve the customer experience. To achieve high accuracy and
consistency in labeled data outputs, Language Engineers apply linguistic (e.g.,
semantics, syntax, pragmatics) and scripting expertise to solve natural language
processing and language understanding challenges.

About the team
Amazon is among the world’s top 10 most-visited websites, and Amazon Search
Organization sits at the center of how hundreds of millions of customers
shop—processing billions of queries to find products. Within Amazon Search, the
MIDAS team delivers high-quality labeled data at scale to train and evaluate AI
models and produce metrics that measure customer experience. We operate with
agility, deep linguistic expertise, strong data integrity, self-service
enablement, and frugal use of resources. We partner closely with applied
science, engineering, and product teams to improve semantic matching, ranking,
computer vision, image processing, and augmented reality.

Requirements

• 2+ years of computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, philosophy of language experience
• Master's degree or above in Linguistics or a related field
• 5+ years of relevant professional experience
• Knowledge of and proficiency in the use of Python scripting language
• Knowledge of Regex, SQL, MS Excel, Git.
• Ability to navigate a Unix terminal and use common command line tools.
• Familiarity with annotation tools and workflows.
• Excellent communication and strong organizational skills with a keen eye for details.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, collaborative, and dynamic work environment.
• Willingness to support several projects at one time and to accept reprioritization as necessary.

Nice To Haves

• Proficient in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or Japanese.
• Experience in data science and quantitative research.
• Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup.
• Hands-on experience with machine learning and deep learning techniques in the fields of NLP and search.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, Sagemaker, ML language services, etc.).
• Knowledge of user experience concepts and methods.
• Familiarity with online retail (e-commerce).

Responsibilities

• Design and develop data annotation guidelines and workflows.
• Manage and process large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
• Adopt and design quality control metrics and methodology to evaluate the quality of data annotation.
• Maximize productivity, process efficiency and quality through streamlined workflows, process standardization, documentation, audits and investigations on a periodic basis.
• Handle annotation & data investigation requests from multiple stakeholders with high efficiency and quality in a fast-paced environment.
• Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product managers in defining metrics, guidelines, and workflows.
• Initiate and contribute towards improvement projects, present solution proposals, and implement them.
• Establish processes and mechanisms to onboard and train junior data associates on an ongoing basis.
• Handle work prioritization and deliver based on business priorities.
• Be flexible in changes to conventions deployed in response to customers’ requests and change workflows accordingly.

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level