Machine Learning Lead

About CK-12

CK-12’s mission is to provide free access to open-source educational content and technology tools that empower students as well as teachers to enhance and experiment with different learning styles, resources, levels of competence, and circumstances.

To achieve this noble and ambitious vision, we at CK-12 are challenging the traditional model of education to transform it dramatically. Technology has opened up lots of opportunities to revolutionize education for the benefit of students, teachers, and parents.

We have chosen to be non-profit so that we can effectively realize our mission and we can do the right thing! It also provides us the ability to experiment with big and bold ideas. CK-12 is backed by Vinod Khosla, a renowned technologist and philanthropist.

At CK-12, you’ll experience the benefits of working in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, innovative, and non-bureaucratic environment where you will get a lot of cool things done that you might never have imagined! We are a small group of passionate folks who are determined to disrupt the current form of education. We came together from companies such as Apple, eBay, Amazon, McGraw-Hill, and startups.

Technology is key to scale education and we deeply believe in it. Come develop great solutions on our cloud-based (AWS) AI-first platform delivering rich and interactive
content.

Do our mission, people, and technologies excite you? If the answer is YES! and you are a great technologist who will challenge the status-quo(no order takers please!) by innovating, please come join us! Together, we will change the world!

Check out how CK-12 is making an impact in teaching and learning – CK-12 User Testimonials

The Machine Learning Opportunity

Because students like our site, CK12 now has collected 32 million hours of data from students working through our online curriculum, studying our tutorials, watching videos, working through interactive demonstrations, and answering over 1.6 billion practice questions. The key-stroke level logs of these student sessions provide one of the richest resources on earth for applying machine learning to discover more effective strategies for motivating and helping students learn. Opportunities for machine learning from this data include

  • Learn to track students’ knowledge state as they progress through the material, so that the system can customize instruction to their individual needs. E.g., given data from millions of previous students, learn to predict which practice problems this new student will answer correctly based on their own individual history
  • Learn which videos or interactive displays will best help this new student to master a particular concept
  • Learn which actions (praises, prizes, critiques, challenges) will best motivate this particular student to put in the effort needed to master the material
  • Reinforcement learning of a policy to choose the right personalized teaching action at each step, to maximize the reward of learning outcomes
  • Work on these problems and more, alongside Professor Tom Mitchell from Carnegie Mellon University, who is part of our machine learning team.

Core Responsibilities

  • Translate high-level directions and open-ended product ideas into deliverable projects and lead/drive their completion
  • Architect and implement highly scalable ML solutions for a wide range of systems including multi-modal Information Retrieval, Conversational chatbots, RecSys
  • Own end to end product delivery from inception to research to production
  • Work with cross-functional teams across the organization including Product, Engineering, DevOps, QA, and Content team
  • Manage ML workflows that include data gathering, working with annotators, and ML researchers inside and outside CK12
  • Lead, mentor, and retain a team of highly qualified ML Engineers, and Data Scientists
  • Extract and analyze large volumes of data to deeply understand and deduce a wide range of analytics about CK-12 students, teachers based on their usage history
  • Envision, experiment, build (or discard), and deliver ML products that can disrupt the Edtech space
  • Have fun while driving innovation through ML by challenging the status quo in education and learning and providing creative ML-based solutions
  • Evangelize CK-12’s AI capabilities across various different tech conferences, media, and blogs

Requirements

  • Bachelor’s or higher degree in a quantitative discipline(Computer Science or equivalent) or equivalent work experience
  • Hands-on developer with 10+ years of experience and excellent programming skills (Python is a strong plus)
  • Expertise in Deep Learning approaches for NLP (Transformer based), Predictive Modeling, Search & Recommendation
  • 5+ years of experience in NLP (Information Retrieval, Chatbots, Summarization, Generative Models, etc)
  • 3+ years of experience in Search & Recommendation, Predictive Modelling
  • Proven track record of building scalable production services including ML applications on cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure)
  • Deeply understand the trade-off between model architecture, deployment costs, model accuracy
  • Capacity to handle multiple tasks and prioritize effectively while working with geographically distributed teams Envision what ML can do for education
  • Skills: Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch, SQL & NoSQL databases (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Redshift),Cloud Infrastructure, Big Data technologies(Apache Kafka, Storm)
This position is based out of our office in Palo Alto, California.

Send your application to