Lead Engineer, Common Voice

Lead Engineer, Common Voice

The Mozilla Foundation is a California nonprofit public-benefit organization. Our mission is to ensure the internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all! Today, this includes making sure artificial intelligence (AI) and data driven technology are more trustworthy.

Over the next few years, the majority of our internet health programs will be on ensuring more trustworthy AI. For us, this means two things: human agency is a core part of how AI is built and integrated and corporate accountability is real and implemented. As part of this effort, we are exploring projects that invite the public to participate in creating trustworthy AI by willingly creating and donating data.

Most significantly, this includes the Common Voice project, which aims to shape the future of voice AI! Voice AI leaves most languages, accents and demographics behind. This project seeks to build openly available data sets for training machine-learning driven voice technologies. The core of this project is a platform that supports language communities and individual volunteers to “donate their voice” to an open data set, which anyone can then download for commercial or non-commercial use.

Responsibilities and experience:

The Lead Engineer for Common Voice will be part of a team of three engineers working directly for the project - and as this project is open source, also supported by hundreds of passionate Common Voice volunteers. You will work across the stack.

You will:

• Work directly with the Product Director to shape and inform all aspects of the product roadmap
• Translate strategic product requirements into engineering requirements in close collaboration with the other engineers - you will take the lead on deciding architectural direction and clearly weigh the trade offs between different paths
• You will partner with the Product Manager and Designer to create technical content for PRDs, decide on appropriate ticket articulation, sizing and support allocating tickets between team members
• You will line-manage 2 software engineers, helping them to grow and thrive in their roles. You will use both day-to-day code reviews and regular pairing, and more structured rhythms like progression reviews, to support them.  
• You will be hands-on with the codebase - this is a small team, and you should still expect to help deliver features using a mixture of languages, frameworks and tooling, including HTML, CSS, React, Typescript, Node.js, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, Python and more that support the Common Voice platform and dataset
• You will have primary responsibility for ensuring the security, logging, performance and accessibility of the platform - this means you will support security incident handling (including, on very rare occasions, responding to cyber-emergencies outside of working hours)
• You will be excited to lead technical discovery processes and enshrine engineering best practice, improving tooling, and considering how to use AI to augment workflows
• Partner with the community management team to understand the wide and diverse community of software engineers, language activists and data scientists globally who use and contribute to Common Voice, and respond to that community’s needs, for example by reviewing their PRs 
• Collaborate with designers to build and deploy prototypes and experiments that test experience concepts. You will help plan for iterations inclusive of accessibility and responsive design standard methodologies.
• Communicate clearly, thoughtfully and regularly - this is a remote, distributed team with a strong culture of warmth, trust and openness. 
• Be able to roll with ambiguity and change - we are making several transitions within the platform, and within the organisation. This means it is an exciting time to join!  

You could:

• Give talks and represent the Common Voice project publicly, including at high profile events, or write technical blog posts for our developer community  
• Mentor more junior members of the team, as well as others around Mozilla (e.g through skills-sharing and/or pairing)

Required Qualifications:

• Passion for developing high quality, high impact products, platforms and experiences.
• At least 7+ years of progressively responsible professional experience in full stack web development in a product team or product-centric company.
• Experience leading technical decision making processes and managing and mentoring others
• An interest in voice technology and/or AI.
• Fluency in HTML/CSS, Node.js, React, Python, MySQL and TypeScript
• Experience with data access and pipeline work, including designing and improving infrastructure for ingesting, storing, and transforming data
• Experience with highly scalable distributed systems hosted on cloud providers (e.g. Google Cloud Platform)
• Infrastructure experience - eg with Kubernetes - a strong plus 
• Fluency in web application architecture, including data structures and microservices
• The ability to translate wireframes, style guides and design direction into polished, production ready visual experiences.
• A user-centred approach, with a keen interest in collaborating with and serving a community’s needs. Ideally, have worked on contributor or community participation technologies in the past, or have had substantial personal experience contributing to an open source project.
• Awareness of the need for accessibility in implementation and a willingness to collaborate with designers to deliver inclusive experiences.
• Very strong communication skills -- you communicate your opinions clearly and listen to others carefully.
• Interest working in, and communicating with, multidisciplinary teams with different backgrounds and skillsets - you must have a deep respect for the different skills that people bring.
• A willingness to learn and keep growing, both professionally and personally.
• We welcome applicants from different geographies - willingness to partly overlap with European and African time zones would be helpful. 

Salary and Benefits Information:

The Mozilla Foundation is dedicated to fair and equitable compensation for our staff. We aim to pay a competitive and market-based salary based on the responsibilities and requirements of the role. We do not ask for, or take into account, salary histories in our offer process.

The starting salary ranges for this role are listed below. 

• Canada: [$158,085.00 - $177,557.00] [target salary offer - $162,941.63]
• US: [$117,100.00 - $131,523.70] [target salary offer - $120,697.50]
• UK: [£75,880.80 - £85,227.36]  [target salary offer -£78,211.98 ]
• Germany:[ €91,572.20 - €102,851.53]  [target salary offer - €94,385.45]

Some regions fall into a higher salary market and this is reflected in the example ranges below: 

• New York and San Francisco : [$146,375.00- $164,404.63] [target salary offer - $150,871.88]
• London [£94,851.00- £106,534.20]  [target salary offer -£97,764.98]

The range for your specific location will be discussed in screening conversations if your application is successful.

We offer the following benefits:

• Private Medical Insurance
• Extended Sick Leave
• Global Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Retirement Plan contributions
• Paid Time Off: 20 days annual leave + sick days and your birthday  
• Company Holidays + Shutdown
• Wellness budget
• Professional Development budget
• Top up program for Pregnancy and Parental leaves

Benefits are subject to change at any time at the discretion of Mozilla Foundation.

About our Culture:

The Common Voice team is spread across multiple countries. We care deeply about our mission, and value hard work. We do not value ‘facetime’, and we embrace that our colleagues have lives beyond work. You will be able to work flexibly and remotely - we welcome applications from those who are working alongside other commitments, for example responsibilities of care-giving, or creative projects.

Mozilla Foundation Hiring Practices:

Mozilla understands that valuing diverse creative practices and forms of knowledge are crucial to and enrich the company’s core mission. We encourage applications from everyone, including members of all equity-seeking communities, such as (but certainly not limited to) women, racialized and Indigenous persons, persons with disabilities, and persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and expressions.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation at accommodation@mozillafoundation.org.

Group: C

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