Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Language Modeling (Remote)

Key Skills

BERT, C++, ChatGPT, Effective communication skills, Language modeling, Large Language Models - LLMs, Machine learning techniques, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Optimization, Python Programming, Software Development

Job Description

Quora’s mission is to grow and share the world’s knowledge. To do so, we have two knowledge sharing products:

• Quora: a global knowledge sharing platform with over 300M monthly unique visitors, bringing people together to share insights on various topics and providing a unique platform to learn and connect with others.
• Poe: a platform that lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth dialogue with various AI language models (bots). As AI capabilities rapidly advance, Poe provides a single platform to instantly integrate and utilize these new models.

Behind these products are passionate, collaborative, and high-performing global teams. We have a culture rooted in transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation that allows us to celebrate success and grow together through meaningful work. Join us on this journey to create a positive impact and make a significant change in the world.

About the Team and Role:

Our small Natural Language Processing team works on providing key NLP competence to improve Quora users’ experience. We build end-to-end industry-scale NLP systems for moderation (e.g. spam detection) and content-based recommendation (e.g. topic tagging and modeling content relevance). The team directly supports moderation and growth-related initiatives at Quora. As a remote-first company, our engineers have a high degree of flexibility and autonomy.

We are looking for an experienced Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join our growing NLP engineering team. You will have a unique opportunity to have high impact by advancing our NLP systems, as well as uncovering new opportunities to apply large language models to the Quora product. You will also play a key role in developing tools and abstractions that our other developers would build on top of.

Responsibilities:

• Improve our existing machine learning systems using your core coding skills and ML knowledge
• Identify new opportunities to apply large language models to different parts of the Quora product
• Perform experiments and comparative analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of different model architectures and fine-tune hyperparameters for optimal performance
• Take end-to-end ownership of machine learning systems - from data pipelines, feature engineering, candidate extraction, model training, as well as integration into our production systems
• Continuously research and stay up-to-date with the latest developments in NLP and large language models, utilizing innovative techniques and methodologies to enhance our models
• Collaborate with the manager to lead the effort to transform our NLP systems to a new era of large language models

Minimum Requirements:

• Ability to be available for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
• 6+ years of professional software development experience in machine learning, ideally in an NLP team and/or as tech lead
• BS, MS or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field with a focus on machine learning and NLP
• Previous experience building end-to-end machine learning systems
• Strong innovator who understands the nuances of large language models and hands-on experience working with large language models like GPT, LLAMA, BERT, or Transformer-based architectures
• Proficient knowledge of NLP techniques, including tokenization, language modeling, and embeddings
• Experience with distributed training and optimization techniques for large-scale machine learning models

Preferred Requirements:

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team.
• 2+ years of experience writing Python or C++ code
• Experience with leading large-scale multi-engineer projects

At Quora, we value diversity and inclusivity and welcome individuals from all backgrounds, including marginalized or underrepresented groups in tech, to apply for our job openings. We encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture.