Blue Canoe Learning is seeking a Full Stack Developer to join our team and take ownership of our tools and systems to ensure that our machine learning and scoring technologies are continually improving.

THE PROBLEM:

Over two billion people around the globe are learning English, the operating system of the world’s global business conversation. Unfortunately, mastery remains elusive to hundreds of millions of professionals due to the challenge of pronouncing 14-different critical vowel sounds – the “last mile” of language. Mastery here often makes the different between getting that job interview or promotion, being seen as an outsider in an organization, or being able to build empathy and rapport with customers, patients, or business partners. It is mission-critical for hundreds of millions of jobs.

OUR SOLUTION:

We are building a suite of tools, starting with a mobile app that engages English learners through a game, played with your fingers and your voice. Our speech recognition technology uses machine learning and Alexa-like coaching to give people a personal pronunciation coach on their phones. We track progress and create custom training programs for each user that adapts to their specific country of origin, as people from China pronounce English words differently than people from Brazil. We also provide the ability to upload different language libraries, as people in the shipping industry will have different jargon than people working in medicine. Moreover, we’re not just talking, we’re doing. We have active pilot programs with some of the biggest companies in the world and we’re growing fast.

OUR TEAM:

We’ve brought together a CEO with six exits, a CTO with 18 years of senior technology leadership at Microsoft, and a world-leading expert in teaching English. Our team also holds a patent for an approach to learning English that uses brain science to solve the key pronunciation problem, a solution endorsed by the U.S. State Department. We are also one of the few companies in the world to be accepted into the new startup incubator at the Paul Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Our team collaborates alongside 75+ AI PhDs and researchers, working to take our speech processing and machine learning technology to the next level. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to push the bleeding edge of what’s possible – and do it for an extraordinarily worthy cause: Helping people communicate.

ABOUT THE ROLE:

As a Full Stack Developer, you’ll play a key role in a small four-person dev team, and each of your coworkers will be among the best at what they do. We all help out wherever we’re needed, so versatility and flexibility are critical, but you’ll also have ownership of one or more key pieces of our technology. If you enjoy taking on hard problems, and having the autonomy to see a project through from conception to release, this role is for you! This position is full-time based in Seattle or Bellevue WA.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• You’ll own the app analytics pipeline that we use to track customer engagement as well as pronunciation performance and improvement over time. We use MixPanel, but we add to that our own custom pipeline for pronunciation scoring, player history, and data visualization.
• Work closely with our ML lead to design and build a world-class set of tools for ML training
• Develop web applications for labeling the speech data used for training our ML systems
• Develop other Node.js apps related to managing and processing our training data

REQUIREMENTS:

• 4+ years of experience in a software engineering position
• Experience developing web applications using modern MVC frameworks (ReactJS preferred)
• Thorough understanding of web technologies (HTTP, REST, JSON, HTML, CSS)
• Experience building back-end services with Node.js and AWS
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science (or equivalent experience)
• Passion for building clean, scalable code
• Ability to learn new languages and technologies quickly
• Experience with TypeScript, React Native, and/or Python is a plus
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment with frequent production releases
• Legally eligible to work in the U.S. on an ongoing basis