Founding Engineer (ML/PythonMongoDB/React) - PERM - Americas

About somi:

Over the last 4 years, the founders have had the opportunity to partner with the CXOs of the largest eCommerce companies in the world. Through the years, we gained unique insights that helped us build a strong thesis around the future of commerce, which we think will land at the intersection of personalization, aggregation and social commerce. We have been building somi with the objective of going after this thesis. As founders, we have 20 years of cumulative experience in founding venture backed startups, consulting with Fortune 500 companies and advising CXOs of the largest eCommerce companies in the world. Backed by prolific investors in silicon valley, we are now looking for our founding Engineer who will be responsible for shaping the product for years to come.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture Knowledge:
  ○ Proficiency in designing modern, distributed systems (e.g., microservices, serverless architecture).
  ○ Experience breaking down monoliths into manageable components.
• Data Storage Design:
  ○ Ability to design for high-read/write operations using relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases.
  ○ Understanding of caching (e.g., Redis) for fast response times.
• API Design:
  ○ Experience building efficient, scalable APIs for serving recommendations or search results.
  ○ RESTful or GraphQL API design to optimize communication.
• Event-Driven Systems:
  ○ Knowledge of message queues (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka) for decoupling services.
  ○ Designing for asynchronous tasks like processing recommendations or user interactions.
• Search System Design:
  ○ Familiarity with tools like Elasticsearch for product search and filtering.
  ○ Efficient design of search indexes to enable quick lookups.
• Recommendation Engine Integration:
  ○ Designing how ML models integrate into the system, including inference pipelines and serving recommendations at scale.
• Monitoring and Observability:
  ○ Experience designing systems with built-in logging, monitoring, and alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog).
• Trade-Off Decision Making:
  ○ Ability to make architectural decisions with trade-offs in mind (e.g., consistency vs. availability in
  a distributed system).
• Recommender systems: Design core recommendation engine to facilitate discovery of products across categories.
  ○ Design somi’s core recommendation engine to facilitate discovery of products for our users. We believe that fashion platforms have very little user personalization. Your responsibility would be to build on these models for somi
  ○ Participate in building large-scale (1 million to 10 million) e-commerce recommendation algorithms and systems, including product recommendations, user feed recommendations, video and story recommendations (over time)
  ○ Build short and long term user interest models, analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of various data and design algorithms to explore users' latent interests efficiently
  ○ Responsible for building end to end automated pipelines for AI/ML models in production including model development, model validation, model refit, model recalibration, model monitoring and model serving etc.
  ○ Identify opportunities to enhance personalization capabilities by diving deep into consumer and client needs
  ○ Conduct A/B tests and experiments to iterate and fine-tune algorithms and models
  ○ Design, develop, evaluate and iterate on predictive models for candidate generation and ranking (eg. Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate prediction) , including, but not limited to building real-time data pipelines,
  feature engineering, model optimization and innovation.
  ○ Design and build supporting/debugging tools as needed
• Scalability and Performance: Ensure that the apps can scale to support high traffic and personalized recommendations without compromising performance.
• Collaboration: Work closely with product, design, and marketing teams to align engineering efforts with the company's vision.
• Security and Compliance: Oversee data privacy, security protocols, and regulatory compliance within engineering operations.
• Innovation: Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies, especially in AI, machine learning, and mobile app development, to ensure our platform remains cutting-edge.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Experience with the current tech stack:
  ○ ML stack: Python
  ○ Database Management: Atlas MongoDB
  ○ Cloud: Microsoft Azure
  ○ Front End App Dev: React Native, React JS
• Experience: Proven track record in building 0-1, preferably within e-commerce, or AI-driven platforms. Ideally someone who was an ex-Founder
• Technical Skills: Expertise in AI and machine learning applications for recommender systems and deep knowledge of backend infrastructure and iOS and Android app development
• Agility: Comfortable working in a fast-paced, startup environment with a focus on agile and iterative
  development.
• Communication: Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Education: Advanced degree in Computer science from a reputed university

Why work at somi:

Our vision is to be the next generation shopping app, which redefines how consumers shop globally. We aim to be used by over 100 million users globally and as founders we have the expertise to GTM and business expertise to get there - we need you to help turn the vision into reality

• Competitive salary
• Substantial equity given the early stage of the company
• Have the opportunity to build a category defining product and leave a mark on consumers globally
• Potential to join the founding team in the US