Job Description

The Cooking Lab is the publisher of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (2011), Modernist Cuisine at Home (2012), Photography of Modernist Cuisine (2013), Modernist Bread (2017) and the forthcoming Modernist Pizza.

The Cooking Lab includes a culinary team, an in-house publishing team, as well as a marketing and publicity team — All of the books that we have published have helped make the concepts behind avant-garde cooking, photography, and food science even more widely available. In addition to our award-winning books, The Cooking Lab provides consulting, R & D, and invention services to food companies and culinary equipment makers, large and small. Our research laboratory in Bellevue, Washington includes one of the best equipped kitchens in the world as well as access to a full set of machining, analytical, and computational facilities, provided by the Intellectual Ventures Lab.

The Cooking Lab is looking for a Data Engineer to join their journey to understand food and cooking. This is a role with the option for remote work for someone based within the United States.  In addition to its primary research, MC is very interested in analyzing the received wisdom of recipes from around the world and over time. The Data Engineer will be responsible for leading an audacious effort to catalog, ingest, and analyze the world's baking recipes. 

The Data Engineer will apply computer vision, OCR, natural language processing, and other techniques to transform formatted recipes into structured data. They will lead further development of our pipeline for tagging unstructured data to train machine learning algorithms to identify new recipes. Then, they will perform analysis on the resulting structured data to answer specific questions about the data.

In addition to the recipe analysis responsibilities, the Data Engineer will work with the culinary team for a variety of other scientific analysis and visualization projects.

Responsibilities:

• Expand our in-house framework for ingesting baking recipes
• Further develop our methodology for schematizing, codifying, and analyzing recipes
• Develop SQL queries and/or custom analytical processing in Python for ad hoc requests and projects, as well as ongoing reporting
• Design and implement robust, production-grade systems for data ETL in Python and author SQL for reporting and data transformation
• Implement processes, including human tagging, machine learning, and quality evaluation for codified recipes
• Support culinary team in scientific analysis and visualization projects

Key Qualifications and Required Skills:

• Experience with natural language processing and machine learning
• Proficiency in software development (.NET, Python, Java)
• Experience with Flask based Python applications
• Ability to design data processing pipelines, storage structures, and automation for both on-premise and cloud computing environments
• Experience with extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) of large datasets for ad-hoc analysis in Excel, or other packages
• Familiarity with computer vision and OCR software
• Passion for cooking, culinary history, or culinary science a plus
• This is a regular position with a generous benefits package including medical/dental/vision coverage, paid time off, 401K etc.
• Open to candidates based in the U.S. seeking remote/work from home arrangements (including post pandemic)