Senior Principal AI Scientist

At Talkdesk, we are courageous innovators focused on redefining the customer experience, making the impossible possible for companies globally. We champion an inclusive and diverse culture representative of the communities in which we live and serve. And, we give back to our community by volunteering our time, supporting non-profits, and minimizing our global footprint. Each day, thousands of employees, customers, and partners all over the world trust Talkdesk to deliver a better way to great experiences.

We are recognized as a cloud contact center leader by many of the most influential research organizations, including Gartner and Forrester. With $498 million in total funding, a valuation of more than $10 Billion, and a ranking of #16 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, now is the time to be part of the Talkdesk legacy to help accelerate our success in a new decade of transformational growth.

At Talkdesk, we embrace FAST, our fundamental operating principles that define who we are as an organization. These principles drive us to make the impossible possible. FAST: Focus + Accountability + Speed = Talkdesker.

• Focus: Focus time, energy and attention on what is most impactful for the business and thoughtful about how and when to partner with others.
• Accountability: Hold self and others accountable to meet commitments and drive results. Accept responsibility for successes and failures.
• Speed: Execute with agility and urgency. Act promptly, decisively, and without delay. Make good and timely decisions that keep the organization moving forward.
• Talkdesker: YOU!

What are we doing?

At Talkdesk we are reimagining how people experience contact centers, helping our customers create long-lasting and meaningful relations with their customers. The capacity to make sense of the message that is being conveyed when we communicate has been reserved to humans alone, but we are building the next generation of solutions that will mimic our ability to understand language, ensuring that the customer needs are always well understood and efficiently handled. We are a growing team of curious and talented people that are focused on leveraging the power of Generative AI and machine learning, to deliver tremendous added value to our customers. 

What do we need?

We focus on Applied AI research and engineering to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and Talkdesk products. We’re looking for AI scientists who geek out on solving business problems and impacting millions of people’s daily lives.

We need someone that is a natural problem solver, who likes to be challenged, has the drive to explore, and is committed to quality. We expect you to be a team player, reliable, and easy to communicate with. You will have to leverage different AI modeling techniques to deliver state of the art solutions around natural language understanding and generation. More specifically, you will have to:

• Focus on delivering working and robust products/models to production. Explore, clean, and transform large datasets of unstructured data;
• Apply, combine, and fine-tune different Natural Language Processing/Understanding techniques to achieve optimal and accurate results;
• Analyze complex problems and recommend adequate solutions according to the identified requirements;
• Design, implement, and maintain scalable and performant architectures to support the idealized solutions;
• Passionate about building pipelines that provide observability and metrics-driven monitoring of AI solutions in the wild.

What are we looking for?

• Experience developing, delivering, and operating Artificial Intelligence- / machine learning-based software in production in the cloud
• Fluency in Python and familiarity with Java or Scala
• Hands-on experience with generative language models (including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and monitoring) and related frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, NeMo)
• Familiarity with optimizing LLMs and model serving at scale
• Experience mitigating hallucinations and improving the factuality of GenAI solutions
• Familiarity with supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms (e.g., neural networks, SVM, decision trees, clustering)
• Relevant experience with developing production-grade NLP/Speech tasks (e.g. Natural Language Understanding, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems, Topic Modeling, Speech Recognition, Speaker Diarization, Text-to-Speech etc)
• Comfortable with SDLC and working in planned and predictable development iterations
• Familiarity with Big Data frameworks (e.g. Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, etc)
• Excellent skills in design, debugging, and problem-solving 
• Passion for customers, innovation, product quality, service excellence, and test engineering

Work Environment and Physical Requirements:

Primarily office-environment work, extended periods of sitting or standing, computer-based work. Limited lifting, and equipment usage limited to computer-related equipment (keyboards, mouse, etc.)

The Talkdesk story hinges on empathy and acceptance. It is the shared goal among all Talkdeskers to empower a new kind of customer hero through our innovative software solution, and we firmly believe that the best path to success for our mission is inclusivity, diversity, and genuine acceptance. To that end, we will hire, promote, work along, cheer for, bond with, and warmly welcome into the Talkdesk family all persons without regard to ethnic and racial identity, indigenous heritage, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status.