Live Person is a transformational force in how brands and consumers communicate. With over 18,000 brands, including Citi, HSBC, Disney, Verizon, and Home Depot, we are on a mission to make life easier for people and brands everywhere through trusted Conversational AI. We believe in a future where conversations are the norm for getting your intentions fulfilled - whatever they are.  

We are an innovative, intent-driven company that believes in building the future and we are looking for growth minded, unconventional thinkers, developers and builders to join the team.

You will thrive here if: 

You can operate in a fast paced, dynamic environment

You can build partnerships that move our business forward

You build code that is simple, understandable, and clean  

You see feedback or failure as motivation to learn and to grow 

You believe data-driven decision making is the norm

You relate to our core principles (link) and want to work with Conversational AI experts

In this role, you will work with one of the world’s largest goal-oriented conversational data sets to push the boundaries of computational linguistics and drive innovative new products at scale. In addition to a world-class data set, you’ll also have an at-scale population of expert data annotators (contact center agents) to help drive investigation and learning.

In this role you will:

• Propose and execute research efforts that drive product strategy
• Publish and present cutting-edge research derived from our conversational data
• Apply cutting-edge methods of NLP/NLU to learn and derive value from one of the world’s largest goal-oriented conversational data sets.
• Develop state of the art approaches to unsupervised/semi-supervised problems in intent and dialog management.
• Build and train NLP systems using self-supervision from unannotated dialogue, leveraging latent structure within task-oriented dialogue data to solve classification and dialogue problems more accurately and label-efficiently.

Potential research areas include:

• Faceted unsupervised learning -- how can we inject knowledge into unsupervised tasks? How can we inject knowledge into clustering/similarity tasks to reflect facets we care about (intent) and orthogonalize irrelevant facets?

• Lightly/distantly supervised dialog management ML systems - How can we utilize self-supervision and reinforcement learning to learn representations of conversational goals and policies from unlabelled historical conversations in a goal-oriented setting?
• Controllable natural language generation -- How can we build adaptable natural language generation systems that can be easily controlled/configured? 

Your qualifications are:

• Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Statistics, or Mathematics
• 3-5 years post-graduate experience in ML, specifically in NLU/NLP
• Expertise in NLP techniques to solve problems such as question answering, intent classification, knowledge extraction and dialogue management
• Record of publications in competitive journals/conferences in the field, such as EMNLP, ACL, ICLR, NIPS, NAACL
• Writing Python code that is efficient and clean in a Linux environment
• Experience using packages for Machine Learning (Scikit-Learn), NLP (SpaCy), and Deep Learning (Pytorch)
• Demonstrated capacity to work closely with teammates in a highly collaborative environment, as well as providing strong individual contributions
• Experience with language processing in many languages including Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Italian, and Indonesian is a plus

Why you’ll love working here:

Live Person was named to Fast Company’s World’s most innovative companies of 2020 list for the Artificial Intelligence category. We offer top tier tech & data science colleagues, along with opportunities to push your own limits. We embrace invention and experimentation. You’ll have great benefits and flexible time off to keep your mind fresh. Most importantly, you’ll have an ability to make an impact at work and at brands across the globe as we build the future with trusted Conversational AI together.

At Live Person, people from diverse backgrounds come together to do their best work and be their authentic selves. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. 

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.