Applied Scientist, Content Moderation

Etsy is the global marketplace for unique and creative goods. We build, power, and evolve the tools and technologies that connect entrepreneurs with buyers around the world. Etsy, Inc.'s 'house of brands' portfolio has expanded to now include four individually distinct ecommerce brands – Etsy, fashion resale marketplace Depop, musical instrument marketplace Reverb, and Brazil-based handmade goods marketplace Elo7. As an Etsy employee, you’ll tackle unique problems alongside talented coworkers committed to Keeping Commerce Human. We're large enough that you'll focus on meaningful, complex challenges, but small enough that you can make a rewarding impact.

Etsy is an international marketplace with 65M+ handmade and vintage items from hardworking artists, designers and vintage collectors. In order to keep Etsy a safe and trusted platform, we are building sophisticated and scalable ML/AI technologies as our marketplace continues to grow. We are seeking experienced ML professionals to join us as we establish a team passionate about Content Moderation and Trust and Safety (T&S) under the Applied Machine Learning organization (AML)!

In the AML org, Applied Scientists partner with other teams to develop custom machine-learning models that can drive product vision and customer impact! With the Trust & Safety focus, we are looking for individuals who are product and customer driven as well as passionate about making ML innovations in the area of scalable content moderation to better protect the integrity of our marketplace.

About the Role

Example Projects:

• Develop multimodal models that classify policy violations, including signal from text, image, user behavior, and graph relationships.
• Develop a strategy for collecting unbiased (or less biased) training data to ensure our content moderation models have minimal blind spots
• Implement and compare supervised learning models (LR, GBDT, and DNNs), or ensembles of models, to improve metrics, often with multiple opposing objectives.

What You'll Do:

• Push the state of the art and apply the latest advances in deep learning and machine learning to improve content moderation on Etsy.
• Prototype, optimize, and productionize large-scale ML models that help deliver key results.
• Conduct A/B experiments to validate the effectiveness of ML models and pipelines.
• Collaborate with product managers, software engineers, designers, and operations teams teams to moderate content for tens of millions of users.
• Share impactful and innovative work in the wider ML research community, including speaking publicly at credible ML/DS conferences such as: KDD, WSDM, WWW, Recsys, etc.

Basic requirements:

• A track record of applying machine learning techniques against complex content moderation, risk & fraud, natural language processing, search, or recommender problems.
• Expertise in any of the following fields: multimodal classification, natural language processing, anomaly detection, reinforcement learning, search, or recommender systems
• Software development in the Cloud including common open source or cloud native tools (i.e., git, Linux environments, containers or other tools for writing robust, scalable, production-ready code).

Preferred requirements:

• Completed Ph.D. degree in a quantitative field (e.g., computer science, industrial engineering, applied math, statistics) and 3+ years of shown industry experience with production Machine Learning, or a M.S. degree in related fields and 6+ years of related experience.
• Peer reviewed conference publications

Proficient using Public Cloud Computing (especially Google Cloud Platform).

 We are considering remote candidates based in Ireland for this position. Etsy offers three different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team: Flex mode for candidates who are comfortable traveling to an office location 2+ times per week, Remote mode, and Office-based mode. Learn more about our flexible work modes and vaccination policy here.

What's Next

If you're interested in joining the team at Etsy, please send a cover letter and resume telling us why you'd be right for the position. As you've hopefully seen already, Etsy is a place that values individuality and variety. We don't want you to be like everyone else -- we want you to be like you! So write to us and tell us what you're all about.

Our Promise

At Etsy, we believe that a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace makes us a more relevant, more competitive, and more resilient company. We encourage people from all backgrounds, ages, abilities, and experiences to apply. Etsy is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ancestry, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, pregnancy or caregiver status, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to participate in the job application and interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. While Etsy supports visa sponsorship, sponsorship opportunities may be limited to certain roles and skillsets.