20.3325, Jobs: Comp Ling, Natural Lang Processing: Software Engineer, Amazon

Fri Oct 2 15:26:05 UTC 2009

LINGUIST List: Vol-20-3325. Fri Oct 02 2009. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 20.3325, Jobs: Comp Ling, Natural Lang Processing: Software Engineer, Amazon

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===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 30-Sep-2009
From: C.C. Scott < ccscott at amazon.com >
Subject: English & Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Inforamtion Retrieval: Software Development Engineer, Amazon, Washington, USA

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:24:10
From: C.C. Scott [ccscott at amazon.com]
Subject: English & Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Inforamtion Retrieval: Software Development Engineer, Amazon, Washington, USA

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University or Organization: Amazon 
Job Location: Washington, USA 
Web Address: http://www.amazon.com

Job Rank: Software Development Engineer  

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics; Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, Information Retrieval

Required Language(s): English (eng)

Description:

Amazon.com's Darwin team is looking for exceptional software engineers to
develop algorithms and build systems to automatically solve a variety of
Information Retrieval and Data Mining problems related to the Amazon
Product Catalog - one of the company's biggest assets. 

Our principal challenge is to improve the shopping experience by detecting
duplicate products for sale in the catalog and merging them. Merchants on
Amazon.com provide information about the products they want to sell. Amazon
attempts to match these product data submissions to items in its catalog so
that it can display offers for the same product on a single page. Poorly
structured or incomplete data makes this problem very challenging and often
results in duplicate products getting created in the catalog. These
duplicate products are shown in search results and end up confusing
customers, leading to a bad customer experience. The Darwin team detects
these duplicate products in the Amazon.com catalog using an innovative mix
of Information Retrieval, Data Mining and Natural Language Processing
algorithms and human intelligence harnessed via the Amazon Mechanical Turk.
We then automatically merge products detected as duplicates together,
improving customer experience and the quality of the catalog.

We are also responsible for a variety of other Catalog-related projects
such as placing Product Advertisements on pages, automatically extracting
important product features from the product description with a view to
improving the discovery (search and browse) experience on the website and
detecting egregious cases of poor quality data provided by sellers. 

We are a highly-motivated, co-operative and fun loving team who thrive on
solving challenging problems with innovation. As part of this team you will
be analyzing data, developing new algorithms, building large-scale
distributed software systems in Java using open source technologies such as
Apache Lucene and JBoss and other Amazon.com proprietary technologies.

Qualifications:

The ideal candidate will have the following qualifications:

    * Advanced degree in Computer Science, Math or related field with 5+
years of experience.
    * Past experience in at least one of the following areas - Information
Retrieval, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing or Machine Learning.
    * Desire to analyze data while developing solutions to problems.
    * Strong desire to build high-performance, highly-available and
scalable distributed systems.
    * Strong design and coding skills in Java/C++ on Unix Platforms.
    * Familiar with Perl and have a good understanding of SQL.
    * Be highly innovative, flexible and self-directed.
    * Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Application Deadline: 31-Dec-2009 

Email Address for Applications: ccscott at amazon.com 
Contact Information:
	C.C. Scott 
	Email: ccscott at amazon.com 

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