Sanas
Research Engineer (Machine Translation)
Palo Alto, CA
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 25 days ago
PythonMachine LearningDeep LearningPyTorchNLPRoadmappingSystems EngineeringResearchLeadershipCommunication
About the role
- Language Translation is one of Sanas's most exciting and fastest-growing product lines.
- Identify the highest-leverage research bets - data augmentation, domain adaptation, quality estimation, terminology consistency - and execute on them with measurable quality gains.
- Stay at the frontier of MT research - track and evaluate relevant work - and translate (haha) relevant advances into practical improvements at Sanas.
Responsibilities
- Job Description Translation quality & modeling Own and drive improvements to translation accuracy across Sanas's supported language pairs, with a focus on conversational, spoken-language domains.
- Design, train, and evaluate neural MT models - from fine-tuning large multilingual models to building targeted components for low-resource or high-priority language pairs.
- Develop methods to handle speech disfluencies, sentence fragments, and incomplete utterances gracefully in a streaming translation pipeline.
- Collaborate closely with the speech and inference engineering teams to ensure translation components meet strict real-time latency budgets in production.
- Research direction & technical leadership Define and maintain a research roadmap for MT and simultaneous interpretation, prioritizing work that moves production quality metrics.
- Strong command of MT evaluation methodology - automated metrics, human evaluation design, and error analysis.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience with simultaneous or streaming translation, including segmentation and low-latency decoding strategies.
Nice to have
- Fluency in English plus working proficiency in at least one non-English language is a strong plus.
Benefits
- Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred) Demonstrated ability to set a research agenda, execute independently, and communicate findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Bonus Experience with speech translation (end-to-end or cascaded) and speech-aware MT pipelines.
This listing is sourced directly from Sanas's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.