Director, Research Engineering

Description
Director, Research Engineering

The goal of Yahoo! Research is to be a world-class research organization whose mission is to develop the new sciences of the Internet on which the next generation of Yahoo! products and services will be based. To support our cutting-edge research agenda, we are growing a corps of Research Engineers, who will work together with our Research Scientists to develop novel software solutions for problems in search and information retrieval, machine learning, computational linguistics, matrix and graph algorithms, unsupervised clustering, data mining, human-computer interaction/user experience, social media, and microeconomics - all at huge scale. We seek a dynamic leader to manage the growth and development of these engineers.

Research Engineers participate as key contributors on several types of projects, including creation of large-scale research prototypes; rapidly evolving research experiments leading to novel insights and research publications; and development and maintenance of leading-edge research platforms to be used in multiple projects. The RE Director should be familiar with and have had experience with each of these kinds of projects.

The Research Engineering Director will manage a small but growing group. We expect to have Research Engineers collocated with several of our research teams in different locations and time zones; as a result the Director should have prior experience in managing a diverse team across multiple locations. More importantly, the Director needs to be familiar with and comfortable in a research environment where system requirements are informal and evolve rapidly.

Significant personal software engineering/development experience is a necessity, as is the proven ability to manage engineering talent in a complex, fast-moving research environment. The RE Director must have intimate knowledge of modern programming languages and environments.

Strong people management skills are a must, as are the usual planning and budgeting skills required for a director-level job. Significantly, the Director must have experience indicative of the ability to manage a rich portfolio of projects and resource assignments, varying in scope, size, and duration.

Skills/Qualifications:
MS in Computer Science or related field; PhD in Computer Science or related field a plus. At least 5 years experience designing and developing modern, object-oriented, Web-based software systems. Several years experience managing teams of engineers on multiple simultaneous development projects.