Software Engineer, Applied Machine Learning (Ads Ranking)

About SmartNews

News should be for everyone. But not when it’s buried under cat videos—or when your internet is spotty—or when it’s in a filter bubble. That’s why we created SmartNews.

Our mission is to discover and deliver quality stories to the world. To accomplish this:

We are a machine learning company. News should be impartial, trending and trustworthy. Our algorithms evaluate millions of articles, social signals and human interactions to deliver the top 0.01% of stories that matter most, right now.

We love content. News should be sustainable. We support quality journalism and respect publishers by sharing article traffic and revenue.

Please note that we will only consider you for one application at a time.

Position

Mission

SmartNews is a technology company with a mission of “Delivering the world’s quality information to the people who need it”. We have a leading mobile news app that is used by tens of million of monthly active users in Japan and the U.S. Our challenge is to grow SmartNews to be a leading global product to deliver quality information that will support millions around the world.

To accomplish such a challenge, machine learning on our core Advertisement Ranking system is crucial in building a profitable advertisement ecosystem to support the company's aggressive growth.

Culture

Our engineers come from a variety of backgrounds from large, well-established companies to small ventures. We believe that employees with diverse sets of skills working together make for strong, cohesive teams.

Visit our People page to see interviews of our engineering leaders!

https://careers.smartnews.com/people/

Machine Learning Engineer Responsibilities

Machine Learning engineer for Ads Ranking is responsible for Deep Neural Network (DNN) based machine learning architecture, and scaling core-ranking system by solving a range of online prediction, recommendation, and optimization problems with engineering and mathematical thinking to maximize ads revenue and performance.

• Develop Ads Ranking core systems and algorithms to generate relevant ads that leads to the growth of profitable ads-ecosystem (e.g ads targeting, ranking, auction, strategy, model serving reliability, etc)
• Build highly scalable machine learning/deep learning systems/models to improve ads ranking quality. Relevant model types include but are not limited to user click through rate (CTR), user conversion (CVR), prediction model, and user targeting model 
• Collaborate closely with cross functional teams, such as product managers and product specialists, to achieve improvements and efficiency of ads auction and bidding strategies by releasing new algorithms
• Collaborate closely with backend engineers to develop scalable ads ranking and delivery system

Your qualification

• BS degree or above in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Science (physics or mathematics) or other relevant majors
• 3+ years experience in the prediction, optimization, or other relevant systems for the online web service (e.g online advertisement, content recommendation, etc)
• Experience in making business impact through machine learning, deep learning, or mathematical optimization (e.g achieving increase of revenue of the business or user volume of the service)
• Familiar with architecture and implementation mechanism of at least one mainstream machine learning programming framework (TensorFlow/Pytorch/MXNet/etc)
• Business level English

Will be a plus

• M.S. or Ph.D in the relevant major
• Experience in AWS, SpringBoot, MySQL, Hive, Hadoop, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes
• Have participated in development for high traffic web services (for example, experience in backend engineering in ads-delivery server)
• Experience in ads industry
• Have basic understandings of statistics, and various mathematics at a liberal arts level. Knowledge in game theory and auction theory
• Business level Japanese

What we offer

• Support programs for self-improvement and career development (language learning, etc.)
• ChikyuCoffee - Delicious coffee provided by our Barista every day (Tokyo Office)
• SmartKitchen - Healthy lunch on a daily basis for free (Tokyo Office)
• Transportation coverage (maximum 50,000 yen)
• Various social insurance benefits included