Senior Applied Scientist, NLP

Our People. Our Culture

At Dialpad, we believe that when the right people come together, anything is possible. We’ve created an incredible, passionate, and welcoming culture that truly makes Dialpad an amazing place to work.  We also place equity, balance, and belonging at the heart of everything we do.

At Dialpad, work isn’t a place you go, it's a thing you do. And we don’t just build products for anywhere workers—we are anywhere workers. With offices in the Bay Area, Austin, Vancouver, Waterloo, Tokyo, London, Sydney, and Bangalore to support our hybrid workers, and remote workers around the world, we are dedicated to building a diverse workforce, where each individual is welcomed and valued for their different perspectives and contributions. 

About the team

Dialpad is where work comes together—one, beautiful workspace for anywhere communication & collaboration. With the industry’s most innovative business phone system, unlimited text and team messaging, one-click video meetings, and the world’s most advanced AI Contact Center—Dialpad is completely transforming how the world works together.

The Natural Language Processing team in the Ai division of Dialpad analyzes customer voice and digital engagements to provide linguistic insights of business value. We build natural language understanding modules to enhance and streamline business communications, including sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, information extraction, intent detection, question answering and text summarization. We build our own state-of-the-art solutions using a mixture of in-house and open source technologies ranging from knowledge-engineered solutions to the very latest deep learning transformer models, while carefully considering the ethical impact of our research.

We’re an eclectic group of scientists, with backgrounds in diverse fields including linguistics, computational linguistics, machine learning, computer science, materials science, biology, and quantum physics. And we work in a mix of tools and technologies -- Python and Pytorch mostly, but some Keras, Tensorflow, and miscellaneous programming languages to keep things varied.

Your role

As an Applied Scientist, you will research, experiment and build natural language understanding modules to enhance business communications. You’ll work closely with product engineers, designers, data engineers, data analysts, automatic speech recognition scientists, digital engagement engineers and a data annotation team. We build innovative product features based on sound science. We encourage our team members to publish and participate in academic conferences such as SIGIR, ACL, and EMNLP. You can get a flavor for the work of the team from our blog posts:

• https://www.dialpad.com/blog/category/dialpad-ai/
• https://towardsdatascience.com/tagged/dialpad

This position reports to our Manager of Applied Science. Most of the team is based in the Vancouver and Kitchener area, but we’re open to remote work from within Canada or the USA.

What you’ll do 

In your first 30 days:

• You’ll work closely with your manager and an onboarding buddy to learn our technical infrastructure and our linguistic domain
• Working with your buddy, you’ll dig into our data and begin to make some modifications to code for extracting a linguistic “moment”. This will get you familiar with how we develop and deploy our features. Recent projects that new hires took on during their first 30 days include flagging personally identifiable information in transcripts, formatting and extracting postal codes, and experimenting with data augmentation methods to improve a sequence labeling model
• You’ll attend the weekly learning seminars that our team and the speech recognition team runs to discuss the latest research on our team, papers hot off arXiv, or interesting conferences

In your first 60 days:

• You’ll take on a task in collaboration with another colleague. You’ll do the data exploration, maybe build a prototype, and write up an experiment plan
• You’ll meet with our product managers to discuss how these ideas fit with the overall product, and brainstorm with UI designers about what the feature might look like in the product
• You’ll be invited to give an internal presentation to the other scientists about some area that interests you at one of the learning sessions
• You’ll spend a lot of time iterating on experiments. We try to make sure scientists and software developers have lots of meeting-free time to focus on the fun bits of the job

In your first 90 days:

• You’ll see your first major project move through the stages of internal deployment then into production. There’s usually a period of tuning and refining when we see how things operate at scale
• You’ll participate in the team’s brainstorming sessions as we plan for the quarter and year ahead
• You might attend a conference on machine learning or computational linguistics

Skills you’ll bring

• A Master’s or PhD degree in linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science, machine learning or equivalent practical experience and a real passion for language.
• Experience conducting innovative research.
• Coding experience in Python or similar.
• Familiarity with Pytorch, Keras or Tensorflow is a plus.
• Over the coming years we’ll be extending to Spanish, French, Japanese and other languages, as well as other varieties of English, so if you have some proficiency in other languages be sure to mention it!

Dialpad benefits and perks

Equity, balance, and belonging

At Dialpad, we strive to ensure that Dialers are free to bring their full selves to work each day, and champion the intersectionality that exists between gender identity, ethnicity, age, disability status, and the many other aspects of our greater humanity.

Culture

We’ve been named a Top Workplace seven times, and a big part of this is because of our collaborative culture that elevates our teammates, celebrates wins, and brings together passion and talent. 

Compensation and equity

Teamwork makes the dream work, and Dialpad offers competitive salaries in addition to stock options because each and every Dialer participates in our success.

Benefits, time-off, and wellness

An apple a day keeps the doctor away—and it doesn’t hurt that we offer flexible time off and great options for medical, dental, and vision plans for all employees. Along with that, employees also receive a monthly stipend to help cover your cell phone bill, home internet bill, home office equipment, gym membership costs, a variety of wellness events, and more!

Continuing education

Dialpad offers a yearly stipend for continued learning and education expenses.