Lead NLP Research Scientist

Genies is culture’s avatar technology company empowering developers and artists to create their own interoperable gamified consumer experiences. The company has raised $250 million from investors including Silver Lake, BOND, NEA, and Bob Iger. Initially, Genies were adopted by thousands of Hollywood icons including Justin Bieber and Rihanna through partnerships with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. Today, the company is also delivering avatars to the masses through experiences built with its Developer Kit and artist crowdsourced platform, The Workshop. These experiences all integrate together to form one avatar social network, Genies Party.

Genies is hiring a Lead NLP Research Scientist to drive the development of our NLP technologies and products. Seated in our San Mateo based headquarter and reporting to the VP of Engineering, this Lead NLP Engineer will play a pivotal role in utilizing advanced NLP and ML tools to create emotionally intelligent avatars that connect with users, and create a highly user centric content experience.

Your responsibilities include recognizing and responding to emotional cues, giving each avatar a distinct voice and persona, and tailoring data capture to the overall content experience. You'll also be at the forefront of shaping the future of AI-driven content and gameplay, ensuring immersive and unique experiences. You'll work hand in hand with our broader Avatar Tech and R&D team to integrate multimodal techniques, allowing avatars to understand and respond to text, motions, speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Our mission is to revolutionize digital avatars and their ability to be interoperable across digital experiences; making them empathetic and authentic in user interactions, ushering in a new era of social engagement.

Genies leads the way in developing next-gen AI avatars for celebrities, enabling personalized interactions, social experiences, and adaptive learning. Thousands of cultural influencers and tastemakers have already embraced Genies, training their smart avatars for fully personalized conversations, interactions, and gameplay in Genies' avatar social network. Our vision is to elevate digital interaction to an unprecedented level of personalization and immersion, bringing creators and influential tastemakers to life within our ecosystem.

Genies will deliver on creating an interoperable avatar network. Are you up for helping us make it happen? Join us in shaping the future of avatar technology!

Examples of what you could do: 

• Identifying innovative NLP solutions for our product suite and defining the roadmap for their implementation.
• Lead the training, fine-tuning, and deployment of large language models 
• Oversee the AI lifecycle from data acquisition to model deployment and real-time monitoring, guaranteeing efficiency at each phase.
• Collaborate with cross-functional units, fostering knowledge exchange and enhancing business impact through machine learning.

What you have: 

• Established expertise and genuine passion for natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, deep learning, and large language models. 
• Minimum of 3 years in model training, deployment, and procedures for efficiently acquiring and validating human-labeled data.
• Experience training, fine-tuning and deploying large language models (LLM)
• Proven track record of implementing NLP techniques to develop conversational agents, chatbots, or virtual assistants
• Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX.
• Familiarity with NLP toolkits such as spaCy and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Solid communication skills complemented by a history of fruitful collaborations.
• Thrive in a high-tempo setting, demonstrating flexibility as project requirements shift.
• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming.
• Self-motivated and adept at operating independently.

Nice to have: 

• An advanced degree (PhD or Master's) in computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline.
• Prior roles as a tech lead or manager.
• Experience crafting machine learning models in cloud environments like AWS or GCP, with specific knowledge of Sagemaker being a plus 
• Published contributions in renowned machine learning conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, EMNLP, CVPR, MLSys, etc.) or journals.
• Experience with game theory, AI creator bots, and emotionally intelligent avatars

How Genies will support you

Genies is a well-funded, growing