Research Scientist

About Yahoo Search

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

Yahoo Search is one of the most highly scaled applications on the planet. We hire world-class engineers to support our ambitious product and platform goals. Our engineers work in a highly collaborative environment with a strong emphasis on technical excellence and innovation. This is a unique opportunity as we’re reimagining the future of Search, to reinvent how users find information and accomplish their goals. To achieve this vision, we’re integrating new technology and expanding our infrastructure. This role demands strategic partnership, analytical thinking, exceptional planning and execution skills, ambitious innovation, obsession with quality and user needs, and a passion for solving complex problems. If you’re someone who enjoys being part of high-performing teams, this role is for you.

The Search Research Team

The Search Research team at Yahoo has a direct impact on the quality of various products and services at Yahoo Search. Our team provides solutions and technologies in machine learning for query understanding, news ranking, search results clustering, and AI-powered search.

Responsibilities

• Capability to understand the technical challenges of a real-world problem.
• Ability to think and formulate problems from first principles and map them to one or more Machine Learning paradigms or create a new Machine Learning paradigm for it.
• Strong desire and ability to code up algorithms with good understanding and champion them to be used in products.
• Review state-of-the-art approaches, explore new ones, propose appropriate solutions.
• Identify opportunities in existing products to enrich them with Machine Learning ideas.
• Defining the technical requirements, which involves but not limited to, data collection, evaluation mechanism and production serving strategy.
• Ability to analyze data and realize patterns in them.
• Design solutions that can scale.
• System extensibility, i.e., considering how the systems can evolve over time.
• Communication skills in terms of conveying technical ideas.
• Design metrics and experiments to analyze problems and measure results.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to put research results into action.
• Explain complex ML concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. Use examples and analogies.
• Generate intellectual property with patent applications and publications at relevant forums.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of track record driving impact in the industry.
• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, Applied Math or related field.
• Expertise in AI, machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing.
• Advanced coding skills in languages such as Java, Scala, Python or similar.
• Experience with collaborative research, as evidenced through solid publications or proven track record of designing and leading integration of state-of-the-art ML techniques into products.

Key skills/competency

• Machine Learning
• Deep Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• AI
• Algorithm Design
• Data Analysis
• Scalable Systems
• Experimentation
• Problem Solving
• Collaboration