The Position
As Director for Tweet Understanding, you will lead ML and engineering teams that identify what a Tweet is about. You will also own Twitter's knowledge graph. You will define the vision and technical strategy, identify opportunities and drive collaborations to improve user experience through content understanding
Tweet Understanding is a fairly new organization within Twitter Cortex, the central machine learning organization at Twitter. Cortex’s mission is to empower internal teams to efficiently leverage machine learning by providing platform, modeling, and research expertise while advancing the ML technologies within Twitter.
Understanding what a tweet is about is a nascent but foundational capability at Twitter. It is used in key parts of Twitter's product such as allowing users to receive tweets about topics of interest, identifying events, and improving Twitter's revenue. We leverage NLP and computer vision models built by other teams and build ML models, engineering infrastructure, and tools that help annotate Tweets to indicate what it is about.
You will drive the technical strategy for helping Twitter understand Tweet content to improve various user experiences. You will lead 3 or more teams that own Twitter's knowledge graph, topic modeling and tools, and infrastructure. You will build a compelling vision and technical strategy by partnering with product management and senior technical leaders in your organization. You will lead your organization to identify additional areas where understanding tweet content can add value, motivate additional investment and build out new teams as needed.
You will collaborate with product management to define organizational goals, drive alignment with customers around these and ensure delivery of the goals. You will hire, mentor and grow your teams.
Qualifications
MS or PhD in Computer Science with a focus on machine learning, mathematics or related quantitative field or commensurate work experience. Strong background in software engineering
Track record leading ML product development: 8+ years of experience managing machine learning and software development teams of which 4+ years of experience is in managing managers of such teams. Track record of leading teams to apply NLP and/or ML teams to add substantial product value. Strong product judgement. Can contribute to product strategy and drive alignment among functions.
Strong technical depth in NLP and/or ML: 5+ years as a hands-on practitioner developing NLP and/or other Machine Learning models for production use cases. Can partner with modelers, developers and customers to break down problems and make the right technology investments over the long term alongside the right product explorations. Can set teams up to focus and deliver speed and quality. Strong grasp of designing good metrics and hypotheses.
People management and team building. Can coach and grow senior leaders to Directors, foster healthy engineering management in the organization, and attract and retain senior engineers. Can build a diverse, inclusive, and decentralized organization and scale the organization.
Operational excellence. Can evaluate and design the right processes and systems to facilitate communications, improve execution, and ensure accountability. Able to work collaboratively across a broader engineering organization with a complex mission.
Desired:
Experience with topic modeling and/or building knowledge graphs is a plus
Track record of innovation and thinking big as evidenced by products conceived and launched, research publications and/or patents
Company Description
Twitter is what’s happening and what people are talking about right now. For us, life's not about a job, it's about purpose. We believe real change starts with conversation. Here, your voice matters. Come as you are and together we'll do what's right (not what's easy) to serve the public conversation.