Lead Engineer, Common Voice

Lead Engineer, Common Voice

The Mozilla Foundation is a California nonprofit public-benefit organization. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all! Today, this includes making sure artificial intelligence (AI) and data driven technology are more trustworthy.

Over the next few years, the majority of our internet health programs will be on ensuring more trustworthy AI. For us, this means two things: human agency is a core part of how AI is built and integrated and corporate accountability is real and implemented. As part of this effort, we are exploring projects that invite the public to participate in creating trustworthy AI by willingly creating and donating data.

Most significantly, this includes the Common Voice project, which aims to shape the future of voice AI! Voice AI leaves most languages, accents and demographics behind. This project seeks to build openly available data sets for training machine-learning driven voice technologies. The core of this project is a platform that supports language communities and individual volunteers to “donate their voice” to an open data set, which anyone can then download for commercial or non-commercial use.

Responsibilities and experience:

The Lead Engineer for Common Voice will be part of a team of three engineers working directly for the project - and as this project is open source, also supported by hundreds of passionate Common Voice volunteers. You will work across the stack.

You will:

• Work directly with the Product Director to shape and inform all aspects of the product roadmap
• Translate strategic product requirements into engineering requirements in close collaboration with the other engineers - you will take the lead on deciding architectural direction and clearly weigh the trade offs between different paths
• You will partner with the Product Manager and Designer to create technical content for PRDs, decide on appropriate ticket articulation, sizing and support allocating tickets between team members
• You will line-manage 2 software engineers, helping them to grow and thrive in their roles. You will use both day-to-day code reviews and regular pairing, and more structured rhythms like progression reviews, to support them.  
• You will be hands-on with the codebase - this is a small team, and you should still expect to help deliver features using a mixture of languages, frameworks and tooling, including HTML, CSS, React, Typescript, Node.js, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, Python and more that support the Common Voice platform and dataset
• You will have primary responsibility for ensuring the security, logging, performance and accessibility of the platform - this means you will support security incident handling (including, on very rare occasions, responding to cyber-emergencies outside of working hours)
• You will be excited to lead technical discovery processes and enshrine engineering best practice, improving tooling, and considering how to use AI to augment workflows
• Partner with the community management team to understand the wide and diverse community of software engineers, language activists and data scientists globally who use and contribute to Common Voice, and respond to that community’s needs, for example by reviewing their PRs 
• Collaborate with designers to build and deploy prototypes and experiments that test experience concepts. You will help plan for iterations inclusive of accessibility and responsive design standard methodologies.
• Communicate clearly, thoughtfully and regularly - this is a remote, distributed team with a strong culture of warmth, trust and openness. 
• Be able to roll with ambiguity and change - we are making several transitions within the platform, and within the organisation. This means it is an exciting time to join!  

You could:

• Give talks and represent the Common Voice project publicly, including at high profile events, or write technical blog posts for our developer community  
• Mentor more junior members of the team, as well as others around Mozilla (e.g through skills-sharing and/or pairing)

Required Qualifications:

• Passion for developing high quality, high impact products, platforms and experiences.
• At least 7+ years of progressively responsible professional experience in full stack web development in a product team or product-centric company.