We’re looking for some students with a strong information retrieval background to join our rapidly growing team and help us solve some of the world’s most difficult problems. One of the best things about working at Cataphora is the sheer variety and scale of the technical challenges that we face every day. We have no shortage of substantive real world problems, all with high levels of importance and visibility to our clients. We have a need for people that can navigate the maze, developing solutions to take our technology to the next level.

This position will consist primarily of part-time quality engineering work during the school year; you should have interests in verification, validation and ensuring a strong engineering process, as well as taking real ownership for the things you work on. Much of the work will involve coordinating with senior engineers and managers to augment or create new tests by creating or annotating corpora of data and writing code. After you graduate, if there is a mutual fit, you may continue full-time in either Ann Arbor or at our headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.

Our quality team tests software that reveals patterns of human behavior implicit in digital data. Consequently, while part of our work involves testing algorithmic limits with big data in both manual and automated ways, another part is advocating for user interests while evaluating complex, compelling and entertaining visualizations. As an engineer, you will be expected to help create and use automation to improve functional testing of applications, in addition to doing some manual testing.

At Cataphora, we expect you to be creative and versatile, but of course it’s always great if there’s a specific area of technology you’re especially talented in. If your response to uncertainty is to dive in headfirst, rather than run away, Cataphora may be the right fit for you.

What we don’t care about

• How many years of experience you have (though, of course, more senior engineers will be considered as such)
• What your previous job titles were
• What programming languages you know (internally, we use a mix of Java, C++, and Python, but if you’re smart, you can always learn)
• Any other silly buzzwords

What we do care about

• Your intelligence and problem solving capacity
• Solid understanding of IR concepts like precision and recall
• Your ability to write at least some code
• Technical creativity, pragmatism, and flexibility in approaches used
• An ability to solve problems under conditions that can be demanding due to time constraints, problem difficulty, and less than complete specification of requirements
• An ability to adapt to different computing environments – Windows, Linux, VMs
• Most importantly, a belief that there is always a better way

Note: You must have U.S. citizenship, permanent residency, or be able to obtain a visa with authorization to work in the United States. We will sponsor visas where appropriate.

To apply, please send your resume (inline preferred; RTF, Word Doc or PDF otherwise) to work@cataphora.com.