Job summary
Do you want to work on one of the coolest and most innovative pieces of technology in recent years? Come join us! We're the Text to Speech (TTS) team at Amazon. We build best-in-class TTS solutions and create magical experiences on Amazon's growing portfolio of speech products.


Key job responsibilities
We are looking for a passionate, talented, and technology-savvy language engineer to help build industry-leading portfolio of TTS voices grounded on most recent advances in speech and language technology. Our mission is to push the envelope in Text-to-Speech (TTS) in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers. Your role is to leverage your strong background in linguistics and language technologies to help build the next generation of our synthetic voices used by millions of customers every day. In this role, you will be a key member in delivering voices to our customers.

As a TTS Language Engineer you will work alongside audio engineers, researchers, and software development engineers who are subject matter experts in speech synthesis and related fields. You will actively collaborate with program managers to deliver new voice products to Amazon customers on international scale. You will be working on a variety of tasks from natural language processing, machine learning to linguistics as it relates to TTS, to create new voices and experiences. You will bootstrap and test new functionalities, analyze system performance and identify areas for improvement. You will collaborate with other language engineers and data associates in data collection and quality evaluation.

The ideal candidate will be familiar with speech and text processing techniques, with solid knowledge of linguistics or phonetics. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience in training and evaluation of machine learning and deep learning models. The successful candidates will link customer requirements to high-quality speech processing components and lead the development process in a cross-functional team.


A day in the life
Our Language Engineers lead the building of TTS voices from beginning to end, and every day is a step closer to delivering the voice to our customers. You start your morning checking slack and emails overnight from other timezones: customer feedback, company-wide announcements, system notifications and updates from team members based overseas. You respond to these and notice that your customer has delivered you new materials to further enhance your voice with. Depending on the status of your project, you continue your day building a new model, designing a clever way to compose a recording script, or evaluating your DNN model trainings that you had started a few days prior. After attending your stand-up, you might join a meeting with a software engineer about that feature you requested, or with the research team about a new technology they would like you to work with. You may work on resolving a customer issue, where our models pronunciation or interpretation of key phrases could be improved, or are presenting your results in a project status meeting or end-of-sprint review with the team. Towards the end of the day you meet with a customer or end-user delivery team to see the status of integrating your voice with the full end-to-end product. You continue your evaluation, send out your results and respond to emails and slack for your colleagues around the world , and decide on how to train a new DNN speech model for an exciting, upcoming voice experience. Another day moving your projects forward, but it is always Day 1 at Amazon.

About the team
We're the Amazon Text-to-Speech team - bringing effortless, ubiquitous speech capabilities at scale for Amazon customers. We create natural and magical experiences for a growing portfolio of speech products, in the Cloud and for Devices. We are a diverse organisation of multidisciplinary software engineers, computational linguists, scientists, and audio UX designers, organised into multifunctional, agile teams specialized in building state-of-the-art speech synthesis products. We start with our customers needs, design the solution, develop and apply technology and deliver the voice to production and support our customers using these increasingly life—like voices across an expanding range of languages and applications.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Undergraduate degree in Computational Linguistics, Speech Sciences, Linguistics, or a related field
• Knowledge of machine learning and commonly used ML packages and libraries
• Knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. Python, Perl, Ruby, bash)
• Knowledge of phonetics/phonology and ability to create/fix phonetic transcriptions and experience with regular expressions
• Knowledge of Unix/Linux command line tools
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD in Computational Linguistics (or equivalent field with computational emphasis); alternatively, 5 years’ experience in the field
• Experience with machine learning or building machine/deep learning models
• Hands-on experience working with Natural Language Processing or Speech Processing
• Experience investigating the feasibility of applying scientific principles and concepts to business problems and products
• Strong personal interest in learning, researching, and creating new technologies related to foreign languages, linguistics, phonetics, phonology and language technology
• Practical knowledge of version control systems (e.g. Git) and agile development
• Feeling comfortable and motivated when working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment

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