Research Scientist, Voice Program Job in Rakuten India Development Center

Business Overview

Rakuten is the one of the largest internet service companies globally and provides more than 70 services spanning eCommerce, finance, telecommunications, sports and much more to approximately 1.4 billion customers worldwide. Following the strategic vision Rakuten as a data-driven membership company, we are expanding our data activities across multiple Rakuten group companies

Department Overview

Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) is the dedicated Research and Innovation department of Rakuten, with teams in Tokyo, Paris, Boston, San Mateo, Singapore, and Bengaluru.

The Speech Processing Team of the Rakuten Institute of Technology is part of the Global Data Science Department within Rakuten Group, Inc. The team carries out applied research in the speech processing areas primarily in speech recognition and synthesis, keyword spotting, speaker verification, speech dialization, source-channel separation, and other potential areas involving speech and/or audio signals that would support a wide range of applications within the Rakuten ecosystem and its businesses. Some examples of business use cases include Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and automatic transcription of customer engagements for quality enhancement purposes, to name a few.

Position:

Why We Hire

We have a huge amount of real business data, powerful and reliable computer environments, and brilliant scientists and engineers that empower people and society through AI technologies. We are hiring more research scientists to scale up our ability of empowerment. You will be excited that the cutting-edge technologies you develop have an enormous impact on real businesses.

- Work on research projects with senior members

- Work with other research scientists to develop novel algorithms and initiatives that will support the vast amount of business data and resources

- Join the discussion on short/middle-term direction of projects while aligning with business, product and engineering team

- Work with Project Management team to gather business requirements, define suitable KPIs and guide members on how to validate if the solution(s) built meets/exceeds the requirements/KPIs

- Support engineering teams and product teams to build large-scale, integrated speech processing systems, using both in-house developed solutions and external vendor solutions.

- Contribute to the advancement of science via writing papers, attending conferences and submitting patent proposals

- (Optional) Evangelize in standardized evaluation and benchmarking of ASR, TTS, NLU, and NLG systems

Mandatory Qualifications:

- Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related fields.

- Experience in C/C++.

- Experience with scripting languages such as Python and shell scripts.

- Familiarity with popular toolkits and libraries for voice AI

- Must obtain work authorization in country of employment at the time of hire, and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.

- English fluency and ability to communicate effectively with researchers, engineers and business people

- Self-motivated and willingness to take challenges to new technologies, research problems and services

Desired Qualifications:

- Research and software engineer experience demonstrated via grants, fellowships, patents, internship, work experience, and/or coding competitions.

- Research background in speech processing and deep learning.

- Experience with machine learning frameworks such as Tensorflow and/or PyTorch

- Experience with end-to-end product development.

- Familiarity with DevOps, cloud-related development , and other related development toolkits.

- First-authored publications at peer-reviewed conferences (e.g. ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, or similar).

Passion for contributing to business by applying innovative solutions to real world problem