About the company

Are you passionate about using AI to drive future retail business end-to-end? Do you want to have the freedom to propose, experiment and execute your brilliant ideas to hard yet practical problems? Do you believe in business-driven technology development and fast iteration? If so, Wormpex AI Research is the right place for you to make a huge impact. 

Based in Bellevue, Great Seattle area USA, Wormpex AI Research, is the research branch of BianLiFeng, a fast growing convenient store chain in China backed by a global capital. At Wormpex AI research, we build state-of-the-art AI technologies to facilitate new retail logistics from storefronts, warehouses to manufacture. You will be offered a rare opportunity to explore a variety of research domains, e.g. Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Robotics, Operations Research, Graphics, HCI or a combination of the above. You will have the opportunities to deliver advanced AI technologies to different stage of our retail operation process, so as to empower the next generation retail business operation and shopping experiences. You will also conduct exploratory research to secure future opportunities, and publish your research work in top venues. 

Responsibility

We are looking for experienced research/data scientist at different levels (ranging from entry level to director level), who can craft state-of-the-art solutions to practical industrial problems. The exact position will be crafted commensurate with the candidates’ experiences. The position requires gathering and ingesting large volumes of data, and processing them to create insightful descriptive or 2D/3D visual representations to guide business decisions. Specifically, we are interested in candidates in (but not limited to) the following areas:

• Operations research including but not limited to response modeling, recommendation, assortment management, pricing, supply chain, optimization, scheduling, arrangement, assignment, facility location, control theory etc..
• Computer Vision broadly defined in areas such as but not limited to
• Object detection/recognition/segmentation/tracking
• Human sensing, action/activity/event detection and recognition
• Face detection and recognition in the wild
• 3D computer vision including structure from vision and visual SLAM etc.
• Deep learning/machine learning for computer vision including compact DNNs for visual recognition tasks in resource limited computing unit
• Machine learning including meta learning, reinforcement learning, graph learning, learning from small number of samples, and transfer learning
• Computer Graphics including but not limited lighting simulation, crowd simulation, large scale environment rendering
• Human Computer Interaction including experience design, edge computing, social computing, recommendation

You will be encouraged to think out of the box, challenge established expectations, and come up with new ideas that spark innovation and creativity. You will also have accountability for the efficiency and effectiveness of the engineering teams and positioning them to thrive. You will be responsible for:

• People who are seeking for the director level position must have demonstrated capability to also serve as science/technology/data architect.
• Survey, design, prototype and evaluate algorithms in one or a few of the above domains. Propose new ideas, speculate performance, gather testing data, conduct evaluation, identify problems, iterate and improve performance;
• Understand business requirements and engineering documents, understand and extract mathematically formulate the problem, and propose and verify solutions. Write prototype algorithm code, technical reports, patent disclosures, as well as research papers. 
• Business driven technology development. Algorithm evaluation and deployment. Optimize algorithms and apply them to real business applications. Collaborate closely with other researchers and engineers to fast iteration from prototyping to reliable and scalable production.
• Communicate with other researchers and engineers during 1-1 meetings, group discussions and group meetings.
• External collaboration. Conduct discussion and collaboration with university professors and their students. Mentor and guide research intern for publication at top-tier Computer Vision conferences and patent filing in 3D research domain.
• Potential international business meetings / travels between US and China.