Remote eligible: Persons in these roles are welcome to work remotely from any state in the US.

Compensation: $162,170 - $252,990

Sr. Applied Scientist, Semantic Scholar 

Who You Are:

You are a hands-on NLP and ML practitioner that thrives in a fast-paced environment, is self-directed, a team player, and knows how to get things done. You are motivated by creating real-world benefits using AI and know the most impactful solution is sometimes the simpler one.

Who We Are: 

Semantic Scholar is a free, A.I.-powered research tool for scientific literature. We have grown from a groundbreaking research project at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to a tool millions of scholars use every week. Our aim is to empower scholars with easy access to the most relevant information from the world's scientific literature. Our work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Science, and many other publications. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join our Scientific PDF Understanding group.

Your Next Challenge:

Our mission statement at Semantic Scholar is “Accelerating Breakthroughs in Science using AI”. A huge amount of scientific knowledge is locked into PDFs. Using deep learning and other ML techniques we are building a production-quality pipeline to parse PDF content into rich semantic structures. In Semantic Scholar’s dataset there are 70 million scientific PDFs already, and we’re adding millions more each year. PDF-derived data is the foundation for innovative research tools and experiences on Semantic Scholar, like our Semantic Reader interface.

The essential functions for a Senior Applied Scientist for Scientific PDF Understanding include, but are not limited to the following:

• Drive the ML development for our scientific PDF understanding pipelines. 
• Engage in the entire ML software development lifecycle; from ideation and prototyping to implementation and iteration.
• Work with the engineering and research teams to take advanced NLP techniques and put them to work in our high-scale production environment.  
• Release your contributions back to the broader community in the form of open source software, model releases, and additions to Semantic Scholar’s public API and Open Research Corpus. 
• Help build a world-leading scientific publication dataset that will add value to Semantic Scholar and to the broader scientific community.

What You’ll Need:

• Software engineering skills and experience with popular ML software libraries (scikit-learn, SpaCy, huggingface-transformers) and data munging tools (SQL, parallel processing).  
• Familiarity working with cloud compute resources (e.g. AWS) and containerization (e.g. Docker). 
• 5+ years of experience writing software in a professional setting, including 3+ years in applied ML.
• 3+ years experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
• Experience with the complete model development cycle, including data set construction, training, tuning, evaluation, performance profiling, and monitoring. 
• Strong collaboration skills - our environment is small and collaborative, and we'd like you to thrive on working closely with others.

Bonus qualifications

• Advanced degree in Data Science/CS/EE/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/ML/NLP or related fields.
• Contributions to open-source ML or research libraries (e.g. AllenNLP, spaCy).
• Experience with ML approaches fusing language and image inputs.
• Experience successfully operating models at scale in a production setting.

Education

• BS degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.

Physical Demands and Work Environment:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by a team member to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.

• Must be able to remain in a stationary position for long periods of time. 
• The ability to communicate information and ideas so others will understand. Must be able to exchange accurate information in these situations. 
• The ability to observe details at close range.
• Can work under deadlines.

A Little More About AI2:

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit research institute in Seattle founded by Paul Allen. The core mission of AI2 is to contribute to humanity through high-impact research in artificial intelligence. 

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