Senior, Data Scientist – Conversational AI

Walmart; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company as a seasoned NLU data scientist, where your expertise will shape the future of intelligent personal assistants. You'll work on cutting-edge Natural Language Understanding services that enhance customer interactions across various platforms. This role offers the chance to make a significant impact on a vital product used daily by millions. Collaborate with a dynamic team in a hybrid work environment, where innovation and creativity are at the forefront. If you're passionate about technology and eager to drive change, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

401(k) match

Stock purchase plan

Paid maternity and parental leave

PTO

Multiple health plans

Incentive awards for performance

Qualifications

• Experience with Python and SQL, solid knowledge of classical ML models.
• Understanding of statistical measures and familiarity with deep ML models.

Responsibilities

• Develop and improve NLU services for customer interactions.
• Analyze data to identify patterns and enhance model performance.

Skills

Python

Machine Learning

SQL

Data Analysis

Communication Skills

Statistical Analysis

Problem Solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics

PhD in relevant field

Tools

Transformers

BERT

Electra

T5

Job description

Position Summary

The Cortex team is the core A.I. platform powering the vision of delivering the world’s best intelligent personal assistants to Walmart’s customers, accessible via natural voice commands, text messages, rich UI interactions, and a mix of all of the above via multi-modal experiences.

We believe conversations are a natural and powerful user interface for interacting with technology and enable a richer customer experience – both online and in-store. We are building and designing the next generation of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services that other teams can easily integrate and leverage, and build rich experiences: from pure voice and text shopping assistants (Siri, Google Assistant, Text to Shop), to customer care channels, to mobile apps with rich, intertwined, multi-modal interaction modes (Me@Walmart).

Interested in diving in?

We need passionate and seasoned NLU data scientists to help us improve and evolve our capabilities, taking into account the full conversational context, multi-modal interactions, and an ever-increasing list of use cases.

Come at the right time, and you will have an enormous opportunity to make a massive impact on the design, architecture, and implementation of an innovative, mission-critical product, driven by data science, used every day, by people you know, and which customers love.

As part of the emerging tech group, you will also have the additional opportunity of building demos, proof of concepts, creating white papers, writing blogs, etc.

Here are some of our team publications:

• Blog Posts
  • “Building a conversational assistant platform for voice-enabled shopping” https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/building-a-conversational-assistant-platform-for-voice-enabled-shopping-6d174cdc4131
  • “Using Context to Improve Intent Classification in Walmart’s Shopping Assistant” https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/using-context-to-improve-intent-classification-in-walmarts-shopping-assistant-28f62d40fd17
  • “Making Walmart’s Shopping Assistant Proactive” https://medium.com/walmartglobaltech/making-walmarts-shopping-assistant-proactive-53a1764fcdee
• Papers & Talks
  • Semantic Representation and Parsing for Voice eCommerce (Paper and Talk) - Vivek Kaul, Shankara B Subramanya, R2K Workshop at KR 2018
  • Knowledge Graphs for AI-Powered Shopping Assistants, GraphConnect 2020, Ghodrat Aalipour, Mohammed Samiul Saeef https://graphconnect2020.sched.com/event/atkC/knowledge-graphs-for-ai-powered-shopping-assistants
  • Improving Intent Classification in an E-commerce Voice Assistant by Using Inter-Utterance Context (Paper + Talk) - Arpit Sharma, e-Commerce & NLP at ACL 2020 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.ecnlp-1.6/

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience with Python; solid knowledge SQL.
• Hands-on experience with classical ML models, test/train/evaluation metrics, key parameters/techniques that affect model performance.
• Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets.
• Familiarity and ideally experience with more recent deep ML models and NLU (e.g., Transformers, BERT, Electra, T5).
• A business analytical mind; ability to communicate with consumers of the model and present results in intuitive ways.
• Experience analyzing data to identify patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis; passion for fixing issues in the data and finding the optimal representation.
• Ability to take a project from scoping requirements through actual launch.
• A continuous drive to explore, improve, enhance, automate, and optimize models and products.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.
• Bachelor’s degree or certification in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or any other related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations.
• Strong attention to detail and exceptional level of organization.
• Proven ability to achieve results in a fast-paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment.
• Hands-on expertise in many disparate technologies and the full model lifecycle, typically ranging from data pipelines, data extraction, model training, model serving, labeling tools, ML-ops, ad-hoc tooling and all points in between.
• PhD in a relevant field (Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics or a related field).

About Walmart Global Tech

Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity experts and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered. We train our team in the skill sets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail.

Flexible, hybrid work

We use a hybrid way of working that is primarily in office coupled with virtual when not onsite. Our campuses serve as a hub to enhance collaboration, bring us together for purpose and deliver on business needs. This approach helps us make quicker decisions, remove location barriers across our global team and be more flexible in our personal lives.

Benefits

Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include 401(k) match, stock purchase plan, paid maternity and parental leave, PTO, multiple health plans, and much more.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Walmart, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer – By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them