Senior Data Engineer

Sr. Data Engineer

REMOTE / FULL TIME

APPROX HIRE DATE: Feb 2024

About Amira Learning:

We believe every child deserves the chance to become a reader. We seek to help more students learn how to read than any other company in the world. Amira is a rapidly growing and renowned AI startup that was recently named by Business Insider as one of 30 startups to bet your career on. The company is the only education company in the Forbes Top 50 AI Companies, was a Time Magazine Best Invention of 2021, has been featured in the NY Times, selected as the “Future of Education” by the Wall Street Journal, won dozens of awards for software excellence, and has exploded into schools across the country.

Amira is the first, most widely used, and more effective AI-powered reading tutor. Amira is able to listen to young children read out loud, assess their mastery and deliver 1:1 personalized tutoring. Amira is a breakthrough innovation having a real impact on kids’ lives and societal equity. In independent testing done by State Education Agencies, Amira is the only edtech for reading that has proven effective. It is in use in schools in all 50 states and across 16 countries.

About this role:

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer with practical experience building and utilizing LLMs. You will help to create LLM and other ML models that will power the most widely used Intelligent Assistant in U.S. schools, already helping 2 million children.

We are looking for a strong Python engineer who has a background in generative AI and NLP, with experience in areas like language model evaluation; data processing for training and fine-tuning; LLM alignment; reinforcement learning for language model tuning; training and inference optimization.

Who You Are:

• You have experience working on LLMs.
• You have experience working with very large scale data pipelines.
• You have a degree in computer science or a related technical area.
• You are a strong Python programmer.
• You have created Machine Learning models at scale.
• You have experience with SQL queries and/or database manipulation
• You are experienced working in AWS and with AWS services
• You want to continue to be hands-on with LLMs over the next few years.
• You have a desire to be at a Silicon Valley start-up, with the desire and commitment that requires.
• You are able to enjoy working on a remote, distributed team and are a natural collaborator.
• You love writing code – creating good products means a lot to you. Working is fun – not a passport to get to the next weekend.

What You’ll Do:

• Create Python code to enable Amira’s models to run efficiently at scale in production

• Define approaches to content creation that will enable Amira to safely assist students build comprehension skills as related to the use of offline or near real-time LLM inference,.

• Contribute to experiments, including designing experimental details and hypothesis testing, writing reusable code, running evaluations, and organizing and presenting results.

• Work within a distributed team.

• Find mechanisms for enabling the use of the LLM to be economically viable given the limited budgets of public schools.

• Work on LLM alignment to provide proper guard-railing for Amira-student dialog.

• Optimize over the trade-off between performance and (computational, economic) costs of LLM model inference to help support infrastructural limitations for our customers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree, and/or relevant experience

• Ability to operate in a highly efficient manner by multitasking in a fast-paced, goal-oriented environment.

• Exceptional organizational, analytical, and detail-oriented thinking skills.

• Proven track record of meeting/exceeding goals and targets.

• Great interpersonal, written and oral communication skills.

• Experience working across remote teams.

Amira’s Culture

• Flexibility – We encourage and support you to live and work where you desire. Amira works as a truly distributed team. We worked remotely before COVID and we’ll be working remotely after the pandemic is long gone. Our office is Slack. Our coffee room is Zoom. Our team works hard but we work when we want, where we want.

• Collaboration – We work together closely, using collaborative tools and periodic face to face get togethers. We believe great software is like movie-making. Lots of talented people with very different skills have to band together to build a great experience.

• Lean & Agile -- We believe in ownership and continuous feedback. Yes, we employ Scrum ceremonies. But, what we’re really after is using data and learning to be better and to do better for our teachers, students, and players.

• Mission-Driven – What’s important to us is helping kids. We’re about tangible, measured impact.

Amira Learning is proud to celebrate diversity and is committed to building an inclusive workplace regardless of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, age, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.

At Amira, we believe every child deserves the chance to become a reader. Join us to make that happen.