We are the MIDAS team within the Amazon Search organization. We own the end-to-end human annotation requirements for our product partners. This is an opportunity to join a high-performing team that helps customers worldwide find and discover the best products, meet their personalized needs with the right product details, and receive comparisons, recommendations, and more on Amazon. This role is high-visibility and highly cross-functional, requiring collaboration and influence across global product, design, science, operations, and engineering teams.

We are looking for a Language Engineer to join MIDAS to write intuitive, labeler-friendly annotation guidelines that enable measurement of search quality, support data wrangling and analysis, define specifications for labeling UI templates, and report labeled-data quality metrics to deliver on stakeholder requirements and improve the customer experience. To achieve high accuracy and consistency in labeled data outputs, Language Engineers apply linguistic (e.g., semantics, syntax, pragmatics) and scripting expertise to solve natural language processing and language understanding challenges.

Key job responsibilities
Design and develop data annotation guidelines and workflows.
Manage and process large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
Adopt and design quality control metrics and methodology to evaluate the quality of data annotation.
Maximize productivity, process efficiency and quality through streamlined workflows, process standardization, documentation, audits and investigations on a periodic basis.
Handle annotation & data investigation requests from multiple stakeholders with high efficiency and quality in a fast-paced environment.
Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product managers in defining metrics, guidelines, and workflows.
Initiate and contribute towards improvement projects, present solution proposals, and implement them.
Establish processes and mechanisms to onboard and train junior data associates on an ongoing basis.
Handle work prioritization and deliver based on business priorities.
Be flexible in changes to conventions deployed in response to customers’ requests and change workflows accordingly.

About the team
Amazon is among the world’s top 10 most-visited websites, and Amazon Search Organization sits at the center of how hundreds of millions of customers shop—processing billions of queries to find products. Within Amazon Search, the MIDAS team delivers high-quality labeled data at scale to train and evaluate AI models and produce metrics that measure customer experience. We operate with agility, deep linguistic expertise, strong data integrity, self-service enablement, and frugal use of resources. We partner closely with applied science, engineering, and product teams to improve semantic matching, ranking, computer vision, image processing, and augmented reality.

Basic Qualifications

• 2+ years of computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, philosophy of language experience
• Master's degree or above in Linguistics or a related field
• 5+ years of relevant professional experience
• Knowledge of and proficiency in the use of Python scripting language
• Knowledge of Regex, SQL, MS Excel, Git.
• Ability to navigate a Unix terminal and use common command line tools.
• Familiarity with annotation tools and workflows.
• Excellent communication and strong organizational skills with a keen eye for details.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, collaborative, and dynamic work environment.
• Willingness to support several projects at one time and to accept reprioritization as necessary.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proficient in French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or Japanese.
• Experience in data science and quantitative research.
• Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup.
• Hands-on experience with machine learning and deep learning techniques in the fields of NLP and search.
• Experience with AWS services (S3, Sagemaker, ML language services, etc.).
• Knowledge of user experience concepts and methods.
• Familiarity with online retail (e-commerce).

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, WA, Seattle - 82,700.00 - 131,600.00 USD annually