This position is closed and is no longer accepting applications.

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Content Understanding Algorithm

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
  • 💴 No salary range given
  • 🏡 Partially remote
  • 🧪 3+ years experience required
  • 💬 Fluent Japanese
  • 🌏 Apply from abroad
  • 🧳 Relocate to Japan

About SmartNews

SmartNews Shibuya-ku, Tokyo

Created to deliver high-quality news from a wide variety of trusted publishers in one place, the SmartNews team works tirelessly to help readers feel good about being informed.

Key benefits

  • Your ideas matter
  • International team

About the position

In this role, you will leverage advanced content analysis and machine learning techniques to enhance the understanding and classification of diverse content types. Your mission is to drive innovation in content categorization, fake news detection, and bias analysis, ultimately supporting downstream applications such as personalized product recommendations.

By contributing to continuous research, development, and collaboration efforts, you will significantly impact the content ecosystem and align with the overarching goals of SmartNews. Your expertise will help shape the future of content understanding and ensure the delivery of accurate, relevant, and engaging content to our users.

The Team

Content understanding team is to advance the capabilities of content analysis through innovative and cutting-edge technologies. We strive to transform how content is understood, categorized, and utilized across various platforms, ensuring accuracy, relevance, and quality. By leveraging advanced machine learning, NLP, and data analytics, we aim to support and enhance downstream applications such as search, recommendations, and ads. Our goal is to deliver meaningful insights and improve user engagement by providing precise and contextually aware content analysis solutions. Through continuous research, development, and collaboration, aiming to make a significant impact on the content ecosystem for SmartNews.

Responsibilities

This is a hybrid of system engineering and machine learning role:

  • Improve and maintain ML algorithm for content understanding. (Including Image / text / video / audio).
  • Research and develop cutting-edge algorithms.
  • Work end-to-end, from data and model to service.
  • Manage expectations between product side and ML limitation.
  • Develop ML pipeline to make engineers more productive.
  • Lead medium/large sized projects to improve Content Understanding.
  • Propose new ideas for ML-Product and conduct proof of concept (POC).

Requirements

  • 3+ years of experience in designing and implementing machine learning algorithms, and applying them to real world problems.
  • 1+ years of experience focused on NLP related problems.
  • Solid Machine Learning background and deep understanding of certain domains of machine learning techniques, especially in recommendation systems, natural language processing.
  • Strong software development skills with a proven record of shipping changes to production that improved product metrics with machine learning technologies.
  • Good ML product sense. Able to propose improvement suggestions not only for model performance but also for product requirements.
  • Good written and spoken communication skills, can work across functional teams.
  • Expert coding abilities in multiple programming languages (e.g. Java, C++, Python, Scala).
  • MS or BS in computer science, mathematics, physics or other quantitative fields.
  • Fluent in Japanese

Nice to haves

While not specifically required, tell us if you have any of the following.

  • Native in Japanese
  • Experience relevant to search, recommendation, and Ads technologies.
  • Experience with cloud-based architecture, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
  • Strong interest in news and ads content understanding, aligned with our mission.
  • In-depth knowledge of Generative AI (GAI) and expertise in leveraging it effectively.

Meet SmartNews's Developers

When Robert joined SmartNews as a software engineer, most of his colleagues were Japanese. Since then, it’s grown into an international organization where English is predominantly used.

Read his story...

YuCheng is a senior software engineer at SmartNews. He explains the freedom he enjoys at SmartNews: not only from a technical perspective, but also the influence he can have over the direction of the product.

Read his story...

Cortland recently joined SmartNews as an engineering manager, where he leads a six person team. He talks about what drew him to the company, his role as a manager, and how they use matrix management to maximize their engineers’ success.

Read his story...

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