Jobs

Designed for an extremely talented generalist with entrepreneurial ambitions, the Rails Hacker position requires strong web development skills. You should be very familiar with RoR, MySQL, jQuery, and AWS. Interest in machine learning and natural language processing is a plus.

On a day-to-day basis, you’ll spend most of your time in front of a computer alongside the CTO and the rest of the engineering team in a beautiful office with gigantic windows overlooking Market Street in downtown San Francisco. If you’ve ever wondered what the early-growth phase of a hot technology company (a la The Social Network) is like, then this is the gig for you. Here’s a rough breakdown of how you can expect to spend your time:

• 30% RoR development
• 30% Front end coding (HTML/CSS/jQuery)
• 30% Backend Server Management (EC2, Apache, Linux)
• 10% Plotting world domination

We want a hacker. A hacker is someone who solves problems that, quite simply, don’t have known solutions—novel problems that no one has ever solved before. And you, well, JFDI.

You might be fresh out of college or you might have a couple years of experience, but you probably started coding at an early age. Most critically, you don’t need supervision. If you want lots of structure and a product manager telling you exactly what to do & how to do it, you will not fit in here.

Our philosophy is to empower people to get things done, and let them figure out how to do it. If you’re not a crowdsourcing and machine learning expert on day one, you will be soon. And always, always, always, you will be held accountable for your work and rewarded accordingly.

Compensation includes a competitive salary, healthcare, and stock options.

CTO’s note: If you’re a technical badass and know you want to start your own company one day, this job is perfect. In fact, if I wasn’t so dead-set on going to grad school and starting my own company, this is exactly the job I would have wanted after college.

If and when you leave SpeakerText, you will have:

• A tight network of awesome, slightly crazy friends
• Connections to some of the top angels & VCs in the world
• Intermediate-level knowledge of entrepreneurial finance & the capital raising process
• Extensive experience with agile web development
• Expert-level knowledge of cutting edge crowdsourcing/machine learning techniques
• Wealth beyond your wildest dreams*

*Not guaranteed.

Designed for an extremely talented user interface developer with an academic background in HCI, the UX developer position requires expert knowledge across the design stack. You should be comfortable defining a feature's specs, drawing a wireframe, coding a prototype in HTML and CSS, and iterating based on test feedback from real users. Some knowledge of jQuery and/or Ruby on Rails is a plus.

On a day-to-day basis, you’ll spend most of your time in front of a computer alongside the CEO and working directly with the engineering team in a beautiful office with gigantic windows in downtown San Francisco. If you’ve ever wanted to be part of a tight knit team that’s out to conquer the world (a la The Social Network), then this is the gig for you. Here’s a rough breakdown of how you can expect to spend your time:

• 60% Building the perfect human-computer interface(s)
• 15% Ruthlessly A/B testing & optimizing designs
• 15% Making SpeakerText.com beautiful & functional
• 10% Inventing new ways to turn work into a game

We want an artist who can code, a developer who loves solving design problems that no one has ever solved before. You want to make elegant products that are fun to use. Whatever it takes, you JFDI.

You might be fresh out of school or you might have a couple years of experience, but you don’t need supervision. If you want lots of structure and a manager telling you exactly what to do, you won’t fit in here.

Our philosophy is to empower people to get things done, and let them figure out how to do it. You must be able to invent new things. At the end of the day, you will be held accountable for the interfaces you create and rewarded accordingly.

Compensation includes a competitive salary, healthcare, and stock options.

Concrete skills that you will need to have on day one (or shortly thereafter):

• Fluency in writing simple, standards-compliant HTML markup
• Mastery of both CSS fundamentals and the latest CSS3 eye-candy
• Strong understanding of typography
• Ability to design for cross-browser compatibility and consistency
• Light javascript & jQuery skills
• Deep understanding of human-computer interaction
• Comfort with setting up A/B & eye tracking tests

CEO’s note: If you’re a true artist and want to apply your design skills to real world problems that push the envelope of HCI, this is the perfect job.

If and when you leave SpeakerText, expect to have:

• A tight network of awesome, slightly crazy friends
• A killer design portfolio covering multiple products and technologies
• A deep understanding of how machines can help humans work faster
• Helped create a product that will become a standard part of the internet video experience
• Wealth beyond your wildest dreams*

*Not guaranteed.

We are looking for interns to work out of our San Francisco office. The ideal candidate is familiar with web technologies such as:

• Ruby or other dynamic languages
• MVC frameworks such as Rails
• JQuery/js
• HTML/CSS

What you will do:
You will work alongside one or more software developers pushing out features. This can range from admin pages to allow our opts team to manage our crowdsourced labor pool to core features of our machine learning reputation engine that allows us to automatically analyze and rate worker results.

What you will gain:

• You will be surrounded by hackers who will show you the right way to code. By the time you finish your internship you will be up to date with testing standards, coding conventions, and deployment strategies just to name a few.
• Competitive wages, compensation varies with experience

The Company: SpeakerText

SpeakerText is an online video transcription service powered by a virtual assembly line that combines artificial intelligence with crowdsourced labor. Crazy as it sounds, the humans are teaching the machines to become smarter & smarter, paving the way for more & more automation.

The primary technologies that power the web (think Google, both in search and advertising) were designed to understand text and nothing else. As a result, video does not fit into this paradigm and gets indexed poorly, if at all.

Since the 1990s, smart people––including the folks at Google––have been trying to solve this problem and so far, no one has succeeded. And as we see it, they’re not going to, at least not using contemporary software-focused approaches that leverage of HMMs and big data sets. This approach has yielded diminishing returns over time. The real breakthrough will come when we have radically improved hardware—specifically, massively parallel computing architecture—that is >10 years away.

However, if you look at what technologies actually make it out of the research lab today, they almost always end up combining human and artificial intelligence. This includes Google itself, whose PageRank algorithm was revolutionary precisely because it relied upon crowdsourced human hyperlinking.

Enter SpeakerText, the video-to-text service powered by a combination of AI & crowdsourced labor.

Not to sound too grandiose, but we’re fundamentally changing how online video is searched, interacted with and advertised against. The $180 billion global TV advertising industry is just starting to move online, and SpeakerText is in the truly unique position of being able to understand all that video content and convert it into text––not just in a lab or a contrived demo (i.e. where the pure AI approach can work fairly well), but in the real world, reliably and at scale regardless of the recording quality.

We’re not just a service, we’re a platform. Not only does SpeakerText make video accessible and searchable directly, but our API enables other front-end technologies like this one that make video more social and engaging. It’s like Twilio, but for transcription.

Importantly, we have...how to put this...a strong company culture. A few general characteristics:

• Eclectic humor (i.e. the more familiar you are with Urban Dictionary, the better)
• Deep camraderie (i.e. we like each other)
• Unabashed capitalist spirit (i.e. we run a business that makes money)
• Bias in favor of people who are scrappy & self-made

For some context: Our CEO dropped out of Berkeley twice to fight forest fires in Montana, then paid his way through Columbia by working as a paramedic in the South Bronx; our CTO is a 3x entrepreneur who earned his graduate degree in machine learning & autonomous robotics at Carnegie Mellon.

SpeakerText is an equal-opportunity, work-hard, party-hard employer.