IVONA Software is one of Amazon’s top notch development centers. IVONA researches, develops and delivers cutting edge multi-language Text to Speech technology, leading in voice quality, accuracy and ease of use.
As part of our development team you will work within the Amazon Digital Products department. This department has developed significant digital businesses including Amazon MP3, Amazon Video on Demand, IMDB, Amazon Fire TV, the Kindle Fire and our recently released Amazon Echo.
IVONA is a team of creative people who successfully combine passion and ambition in creating one of the best speech synthesizers in the world, and now are one of the most visible teams within Amazon where you will get the chance to have a huge influence on making a positive impact on customers all over the globe.
At Amazon, we take pride in building complete end-to-end solutions, staring from researching a problem, implementing the solution, building a scalable and reliable service and ensuring the service is there when you need it.
Our goal is to build a next generation IVONA Text-to-Speech (TTS) system that takes the user experience to the next level and speaks a large variety of voices in the world’s most spoken languages. The challenges we face is handling whole variety of data which need to be pronounced correctly (such as names, surnames, proper names, foreign words), as well as finding correlation of end-user ratings and internal TTS quality metrics. This requires an engineer approach to improve the basis of huge amount of synthesized texts and semantic knowledge of the text to improve pronunciation of context specific words.
This position is based at IVONA headquarters in Gdansk, Poland.
As part of our development team you will be responsible for research in speech synthesis, providing analysis using mathematical modeling tools to answer important questions, designing system architectures, utilizing code (C/C++, Perl or Java) and existing tools for modeling or prototyping, effective communication with management as well as with colleagues from computer science and business backgrounds. You will be involved in projects from concept to deployment, working closely with our core technology team, taking part in the complete project lifecycle.
- MSc. or PhD degree in Computer Sciences, Machine Learning, or related technical field
- Computational Linguistics or related field
- 5+ years of professional experience in software development
- Proficiency in C/C++
- Proficiency in at least one scripting languages (Perl, Python, Hadoop, Hive, etc)
- Strong fundamentals in problem solving, algorithm design and complexity analysis
- Fundamentals in object-oriented design and data structures
- Strong personal interest in learning, researching, and creating new technologies with high commercial impact
- Proven track record of achievements in language research and development for Text-To-Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition or Natural Language processingKnowledge of parametric and/or unit selection TTS technology
- Knowledge of software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations
- Clear, professional communication skills able to contribute to team discussions