Technical Manager (Amazon Text-to-speech)

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Come join us! We're the Text to Speech (TTS) team at Amazon. We build best-in-class TTS solutions which create natural and magical experiences on Amazon's growing portfolio of speech products.

We are looking for a passionate and inventive Technical Manager to work on our Speech and Machine Learning products and to join us in beautiful Cambridge, UK. If you want to build a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that helps take human-computer interaction to the next level, this position is for you. If you'd like to define and execute the strategic vision for your team with your technical expertise, this is the one. If you want to grow and expand a talented, multicultural team to their full potential, you've come to the right place.

Leading a team a scientists and engineers, you will be accountable for creating and delivering speech synthesis products and features with your team. This will involve running a variety of projects in an agile environment to help us scale, developing and using existing tools for modelling and prototyping, and maintaining and improving the customer experience. Continuously automating and innovating to help us scale to meet the opportunities is part of the day job - as is answering important questions, designing system architectures, via effective communication with management as well as with colleagues from computer science and business backgrounds.

You will be involved in projects from concept to deployment, working closely with our core technology teams, taking part in the complete project lifecycle. You will be able to leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources, to experiment and iterate fast.
Key responsibilities:
· Strategize and lead a Speech and Language Engineering team to deliver on the goals and roadmap for the TTS organisation.
· Collaborate with other Engineering, Product and the Business teams to deliver the right solutions that match the scale of Alexa, Polly and other businesses.
· Influence the organisation’s long term roadmap and resourcing, onboard new technologies onto Production system toolbox, and mentor other Engineers and Scientists.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience of speech synthesis, speech recognition, natural language processing
- Agile experience of coaching teams.
- Scientific thinking and the ability to invent, demonstrated by a track record of thought leadership, or publications, or Conference presentations
- Experience, education or training in Machine Learning techniques
- Software development skills, especially architectural and problem solving skills
- Experience with modelling and optimization techniques tailored to meet business needs and demands in production systems
- Ability to convey scientific or engineering concepts and considerations to non-experts
- Advanced project management experience (e.g. PRINCE2, PMBoK etc.)

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- Advanced degree or equivalent experience in Linguistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related numerate discipline;
- Experience as leader of an engineering or science team and developing junior members from academia/industry to a business environment.
- 3+ years of direct people management experience including performance evaluation and career development
- Knowledge of predictive machine learning, including commonly used programming languages (Python, C/C++, scripting)
- Passionate about setting strategic directions for your team and
- Proven experience in launching projects from concept to go-live.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Basic project management experience