Computer Programmer

Vantage Labs (www.vantage.com) is a world leader and innovator in the development and leveraging of artificial intelligence and natural language technologies into a broad spectrum of vertical markets and industries. Integrating patented AI and linguistic tools, Vantage offers world-class products and services, including award-winning Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, into various vertical markets: Education, Government, Healthcare, and more. 

 

Summary:  

We are seeking a well-rounded Computer Programmer to join our company on a full-time permanent basis and contribute to our search technology development efforts while being based out of our development office in New Hope, PA.  As part of a small team, you will be responsible for taking on various responsibilities and embracing the Agile development approach in order to help us continue to develop high-quality products by being involved in cross-functional discussions and driving new innovative ideas. This position reports directly to our VP of Development. You will be exposed to the design, development, and research on innovative linguistic-based technologies. 

Preferred Skills and Abilities:

- Identify and understand business requirements for new or improved features
- Extend and modify PHP business logic and database persistence to support new end user, administrative, and reporting features.  
- Build REST API endpoints to facilitate integration and secured flow of information between the web interface and back-end server code using PHP, Java and Spring Boot
- Research algorithms, develop training data sets, and produce predictive scoring and classification Machine Learning (ML) models
- Transform natural language raw data into meaningful language features using Natural Language Professing (NLP) techniques to produce inputs to the ML text classification algorithms for supervised and unsupervised learning
- Iterate until f-measure scores for recall/precision are acceptable according to gold-standard data
- Utilize ML scoring and classification models in core Java applications through REST API clients to expand available writing assignments and feedback
- Design and implement new Web user-interface elements for end users to display new and improved features using HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript/Angular. 
- Write complex database queries to extract historical data for training sets and reporting, using SQL, PL/pgSQL (Postgres), DBeaver, and JPA
- Write programs to extract, process, and store data from various 3rd party data services/APIs and integrate them into the project application using PHP, Java, GraphQL and Maven
- Design and implement improved algorithms and methodologies to create scalable solutions to manage high levels of user traffic for the application. 
- Review code for readability, compliance to coding standards, consistency, security, best practices, and to ensure that the feature is ready for formal testing
- Conduct unit and integration testing of existing and newly added features
- Debug programs, rewrite and redesign the source code to improve performance

- Knowledge in some of the standard front-end technologies like CSS, JavaScript (we use JQuery), REST, JSON.  Experience with STRUTS, SPRING, SQL, HTML, XML, JavaScript and/or SCRUM is a plus.- Knowledge of Open Source libraries, tools and frameworks, e.g. for logging, testing, and building.  
- Excitement for the latest trends in application design.  
- Experience with agile software development methodologies like XP and Scrum.  
- Interest to learn more about new languages and frameworks.

Qualifications: 
- Bachelor’s degree or its equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a directly related specialty Information Technology field is required. 

- 1-3+ years of PHP software development experience is preferred:  you must have excellent understanding of MYSQL and deep architectural understanding of PHP web applications & application servers [advanced educational accomplishments will also be considered]. 

- Good knowledge in some back-end technologies (<