Sr Manager, NLP

Job Description

At SAS, where you start doesn't have to be where you end; and there is ample opportunity for internal career mobility. Whether you're looking to grow a new skill or experience a new role, there's no time like the present to take the next step; and we're here to support you in your journey.

About the job

The Advanced Analytics division within R&D is looking for a Sr. Manager for the Natural Language Processing server team. As a member of the larger AI/ML organization you will lead other managers as well as linguists. You will be responsible for the software development and testing of the analytic backend for SAS Viya, SAS Viya Copilot and SAS Visual Text Analytics products.

As a Sr Manager, you will:

• Scope product requirements, estimate effort, and help plan release schedules.
• Enable the team to design and develop product features to provide high quality testable and scalable software solutions, linguistic rules and models in multiple languages.
• Evolve software architecture to meet changes in product requirements.
• Participate in all steps of the continuous development lifecycle - including modeling, evaluation, design, development, and testing.
• Support team members in ensuring quality by creating and maintaining unit tests. Implement a culture of code reviews, cross-training and joint code stewardship.
• Provide support of the product to internal customers.
• Collaborate with team members to implement innovative approaches to real world problems.
• Collaborate with technical writers to share information with end users in the form of product documentation, videos, and/or white papers.
• Encourage team members to engage in peer-reviewed research publication.
• Encourage team members to add to the intellectual property of SAS, including patent publication.
• Ensure all applicable security policies and processes are followed to support the organization's secure software development goals.
• Support and mentor team members in their professional growth.

Role Competencies

• Courage: Proactively confronting difficult issues; making valiant choices and taking bold action in the face of opposition or fear.
• Creating an Inclusive Environment: Making decisions and initiating action to ensure that business unit policies and practices leverage the capabilities and insights of individuals with diverse backgrounds, cultures, styles, abilities, and motivation
• Inspiring Others: Motivating individuals toward higher levels of performance that are aligned with the organization's vision and values.
• Leading Change: Driving organizational and cultural changes needed to achieve strategic objectives; catalyzing new approaches to improve results by transforming organizational culture, systems, or products/services; helping others overcome resistance to change.

Required qualifications

• Requires at least seven years of experience developing software in a relevant area of data analysis, modeling, or decision science.
• Two years of experience in a technical leadership role, such as team leader or mentor.
• Advanced degree in a quantitative field (i.e. Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, etc.) directly related to specified area of analytics.
• Knowledge of machine learning, data science, language modeling and NLP domains.
• Domain knowledge or experience in evaluating, fine-tuning and deploying Large Language Models and Generative AI. Experience in red-teaming, adversarial testing and prompt engineering.
• Experience in working with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Demonstrated experience with unit, regression, and integration testing.
• Demonstrated experience of Agile development practices and tools such as JIRA.
• Understanding of software security - SAST, SCA, DAST
• Demonstrated experience CI/CD and associated tools like Jenkins, Git, Gerrit, Linux commands, etc

Preferred qualifications

• Proficiency in C/C++ and/or Python languages.
• Familiarity with Machine Learning libraries such as PyTorch. Familiarity with open-source tooling, technologies and model repositories such as Specey, BeautifulSoup and HuggingFace.

Resources for career development

• Learn more about Internal Career Mobility on InsideSAS
• Check out the Career Development SharePoint site and join the Career Development community on Yammer
• Learn about career programs, including Career Circles, Career Mentoring and the Learning & Development Exchange
• Explore hundreds of resources in our Career Development Resource Library, organized by topic.

Additional Information

To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States, and should not require, now or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status. SAS is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law. Read more: Know Your Rights. Also view the Pay Transparency notice.

Resumes may be considered in the order they are received. SAS employees performing certain job functions may require access to technology or software subject to export or import regulations. To comply with these regulations, SAS may obtain nationality or citizenship information from applicants for employment. SAS collects this information solely for trade law compliance purposes and does not use it to discriminate unfairly in the hiring process.