Software Engineer for Natural Language User Interfaces

Siemens is a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationally for more than 165 years. As a global technology company, Siemens is rigorously leveraging the advantages that this setup provides.

We are currently seeking a Software Engineer for Natural Language User Interfaces for our Princeton, NJ location. Siemens products are constantly becoming more intelligent and are deployed to solve highly complex problems. In all domains, whether it is Siemens trains, power plants, factory automation, building automation, or electric grid control, more and more tasks are transferred from human operators to machines. This requires new concepts and technologies for human-machine interaction. Our “Architecture and Verification of Intelligent Systems” team is working to integrate these new concepts and technologies into Siemens products. One of these new interaction concepts are conversational, voice-based user interfaces. The Natural Language UI Engineer is responsible to advance this research area and design solutions for our business units. Our research results influence Siemens products and are reflected in patents and publications in journals and conferences.

* Design and implement natural-language based user interfaces for Siemens business units. * Analyze industrial domains and understand the tradeoffs of building a conversational interface in a real world environment. * Evaluate solution alternatives that involve NLP libraries, deep neural networks, constraint solvers, planners, logic reasoning engines, Bayesian belief networks. * Document and communicate architectures for conversational UIs. * Be aware of state-of-the-art natural language user interfaces and technologies to build intelligent systems. * Identify high-impact research topics in natural language user interfaces. * Perform research, development and consulting projects collaborating with colleagues, customers and universities. * Present proposals, concepts, and results to collaborators and customers. * Write papers for presentation in journals and conferences. * Supervise the work of graduate student interns and acquire and lead Siemens-internal projects.

* Masters Required. PhD. in Computer Science is preferred. * Minimum of three years of experience in software development and software engineering is required. (We will consider recent PhD graduates with appropriate graduate research/internship experience.) * Experience in building natural language user interfaces and familiarity with the state-of-the-art of spoken dialog systems * Experience in using neural networks, genetic algorithms, deduction engines, constraint solvers and similar technologies to solve real application problems * Understanding of architectures of deep neural networks and experience designing a deep neural network for NLP tasks (including RNNs and LSTMs) * Strong skills in problem solving, communication, and team work. * Ability to work on a problem from the analysis phase to the implementation of a practical solution. * Ability and interest to establish and maintain a company-internal professional network. * Willingness to travel 20% (domestic/international) * Outstanding written and verbal communication skills in English. * Excellent interpersonal skills and can-do attitude. **Preferred Knowledge and Skills** * Experience in the use of at least some of the following packages: Python NLTK, OpenNLP, UIMA, Stanford NLP packages, including POS tagger * Experience in using word2vec for intent classification and NER * Basic understanding of technologies that are used in spoken dialog systems, such as Bayesian Belief Networks, MDPs, POMDPs * Publication record in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.