Jobs
Click the big blue button below to access our online application form.
We encourage you to first learn more about our company by reading the remainder of this webpage, which describes the motivations for our work, job openings, and expectations.
We currently have openings in Kenya and Poland, at the Africa and EU-based branches of QED.
Alternatively, if for some reason you are too old-fashioned to use an electronic form, you can e-mail your curriculum vitae and a few paragraphs about yourself and why you want to work with us to: jobs@qed.ai
Please ensure that your CV includes the following basic details:
- Professional work experience, with durations.
- Educational history, with degrees and GPAs listed.
- Computer languages known with number of years of experience in each.
- Awards of any sort.
- Any academic publications or deployed software/hardware applications.
- Academic projects can be listed, but should be clearly delineated from work projects.
We would also like to know:
- Something interesting about you that may be unusual or exceptional
- If you are a software developer, links to a project on github/bitbucket that you are proud of, where we can review samples of your code.
- How you heard about us, and why you are potentially interested in working with us.
Motivations And Focus Areas Of Our Work
QED aims to offer unique opportunities to talented builders that wish to work alongside us in making technologies to positively affect the world. After working for almost a decade on a diverse mixture of industrial jobs, we are trying our best to select projects carefully, so that staff can concentrate on interesting problems for which there is little doubt that the solutions will benefit, and clearly not harm, the welfare of others.
Our current focus is human health and agriculture in developing countries. We believe that these topics lie at the crux of many core challenges facing humanity, such as rural poverty and high mortality rates in developing countries, epidemics of nutrient deficiency and disease, and conflict over scarce natural resources. The general optimization problem is to balance the ballooning long-term needs of our population against our planet’s limited capacities in the most sustainable way possible. These problems are quantitatively described by The Sustainable Goals, of which we focus on goals 2, 3, and 15. Our contributions may be small, but if we can bring more awareness to clever applications of technology to this area, perhaps the network effects over time can be large. We believe this kind of work is more meaningful for technologists than advertising, social media, Wall Street, or military weapons … even if the market says otherwise.
To expound on why technologists are needed in this area, agriculture and health in developing countries are big data problems requiring modeling of complex natural processes with untold degrees of freedom. However, these fields is wholly unprepared for the application of modern machine learning, irrespective of what advertisements may claim. Despite its importance, agriculture lags far behind many fields in terms of both the quantity and quality of data being collected, particularly in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia. The challenges of collecting agricultural data are manifold, and include limited access to finance, poor infrastructure, and the logistics of coordinating large-scale ground operations. Furthermore, even when data is collected, it is often not stored in a manner that easily lends itself to analysis or web/mobile application development. As a whole, the agricultural field is decades behind in terms of data science practices and standards of rigor, in which conclusions are regularly being drawn based on analyses carried out in Excel on kilobyte-sized datasets.
Software and hardware engineering can play major roles in advancing the envelope of what is possible with development projects, by enabling scalable data collection, performant data management, modern data mining, and worldwide data dissemination. This is where QED can provide assistance, reaching out to clients in the most need of technological help, often working in third-world environments where this help is least readily available.
Job Openings
Below we list our Basic Requirements which should be satisfied by all staff. Afterwards, we describe our Core Application Verticals, Core Technical Verticals, Core Programming Languages, and Core Frameworks and Tools currently in use. We then list our current job openings which reference these sections.
Basic Requirements
Dedication of at least 24 hrs/week.
Good fluency in English speaking and writing (typing > 35 wpm).
Critical thinking skills, expressiveness, and team-oriented attitude.
And you have to care about the work that you do.
Additional Basic Requirements for Software Developers
Possession or pursuit of a degree in computer science or hardware engineering, or comparable professional experience.
Basics of efficient algorithms.
Willingness to participate in regular code reviews, git commits, and working in teams.
Development primarily on UNIX-based or OSX-Darwin platforms.
Location
While people can work remotely, colocation is still more effective when possible. We are currently focused on filling positions in the following regions:
Kenya
Poland
We also have nice office spaces you can work with us in person at in several cities, such as Nairobi and Warsaw.
Core Application Verticals
- medicine and health care
- agriculture and food security
- environment and climate change
Core Engineering Verticals
- web and mobile applications
- real-time data processing pipelines
- computer vision and data science
- sensor design
Core Programming Languages
- Python
- Javascript
- Java + Kotlin for Android
Core Programming Frameworks / Tools
- Web: Django, React
- Mobile: React Native, Java, Kotlin, Android
- CI: Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Ansible, Selenium
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Analysis: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, scikit-learn, OpenCV
Nice to Have, for Software Developers
- Experience with Django, React, Android, or PyTorch
- Experience with optics, electronics, and/or physics
- Genuine interest in positive applications of tech for medicine and agriculture
- Proficiency with software design patterns
- Experience with programming or math competitions
Perks of Working With QED
- Unusual socially conscious projects
- Flexibility in schedules, with remote options available for strong candidates
- Travel to exotic places throughout the world!
Software Security Engineer / DevOps Expert
- Satisfaction of Basic Requirements, and Additional Requirements for Software Developers.
- +3 years of experience.
- Familiarity with cloud services.
- Ethical hacking experience.
- IaC only. No more manual configurations!
- Strong expertise in networking and secrets management.
- Mentality must match the job!
Android Developer
- Satisfaction of Basic Requirements, and Additional Requirements for Software Developers.
- +1 years of experience in Android app development.
- Deployed apps to the Play Store already.
- Already know or willing to learn Kotlin.
Front-End Developer
- Satisfaction of Basic Requirements, and Additional Requirements for Software Developers.
- +1 year of experience.
- Fluency with the React front-end framework.
- Visual design sense and aesthetics.
Marketing Director
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- High skills in oral, written, and visual communication.
- +2 years of experience in direction of marketing content and online media strategy.
Copywriter
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements
- +2 years of experience in writing in any of the following areas:
- academic writing for scientific journal publication
- marketing, preferably in relation to international development and/or technology
- C2-level English skills, oral and written
Data Visualization Expert
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- +1 year of experience with programming interactive data visualizations.
- Toolsets can include open-source packages such as d3, leaflet, and others, as well as point-and-click systems such as PowerBI and Tableau.
- Aesthetics for clean design and choice of color.
- Portfolio of exemplary data visualizations is expected.
- Bonuses:
- High fluency with Javascript and CSS.
- Experience working with Python.
UI/UX Researcher
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- +2 years of experience with building user interfaces or improving user experience.
- Portfolio of exemplary prior work is expected.
Data Scientist
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- +3 years of experience with both traditional statistical modeling and algorithmic data modeling.
- strong skills in logical reasoning and critical thinking, and the confidence to both express it and also receive constructive feedback through daily code review
- knowledge of basic statistics and probability
- non-superficial intuitions about AI, beyond `import blackbox`
- Respectable track record in competitive data modeling. Well-versed with the latest trends with top-performing tools and the ML research community.
- Strong fluency in Python and main AI-related tools of the trade
- Bonuses:
- Experience working with datasets that cannot fit on a desktop, and systems engineering techniques for overcoming these constraints.
- Experience working with enterprise data warehouse software.
Sales and Communications Specialist
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- +2 years of experience with sales and client outreach, with a preferred emphasis on the international aid and development space.
- Excellent communication skills in oral and written English.
- High emotional intelligence, easily capable of witty conversation and humor.
- Experience with delivering public presentations and preparing decks.
- Bonuses:
- Experience working with technology based products, with a preference toward software.
- Experience working in the verticals of medicine, agriculture, or data analytics.
- Some exposure to computer programming.
Application Analyst / Data Liaison
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- High proficiency in speaking, reading, and quickly composing clear and correct English.
- English typing speed of at least 40 words per minute.
- Strong logical reasoning and attention to detail.
- Agreeable and cooperative face-to-face communications skills.
- Support QED applications, including QC checks, and helping customers map use cases onto platforms.
- Experience with public presentations, having regard for poise and presentability.
- Ability to listen carefully and translate desires into concrete requirements.
- Willing and able to occasionally travel to Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
- Compose and improve to both external and internal documentation on Company’s software and hardware applications.
- Identify problems, diagnose causes, and resolve them or delegate their resolution to appropriate engineers with ticketing systems.
- Applicants should have a high amount of experience with using information technology and be well-calibrated to modern-day UX expectations.
- Preferred:
- Some experience with both computer programming and statistics.
- Experience or energetic interest in medicine and/or agriculture.
- Experience with professional diagramming software.
- Experience with video screencasting.
- Dedicate at least 24 hrs/wk.
- Bonuses: Fluency in multiple foreign languages.
Culture and Expectations
A few remarks on our culture. The term “too big to fail” has been used to justify bailouts for large corporations. We propose an alternative mantra: “too big to succeed”. At a large corporation, responsibilities are often obfuscated or diminished by the fact that most staff are small cogs in a machine consisting of +50,000 cogs. High levels of bureaucracy, minuscule project ownership, and constant meddling from business agents make innovation very difficult.
The second contrarian mantra we propose is, “too small to fail”. While the paths that smaller companies take may be unconventional, they are also (1) more able to learn quickly through rapid experimentation, unfettered by excessive internal regulations, and (2) highly motivated to work cleverly and succeed, as no one is there to bail them out and inefficiencies cannot be sustained. Consequently, based on interviews to date we have found that our standards are at least comparable if not higher than that of most blue chip tech companies.
For these reasons, we impose an extremely light amount of bureaucracy. There is no matrix organizational structure. We do not focus on careerism and politicking, and encourage focusing only on the mission and delivering excellent work for clientele, by any means necessary. Regardless of one’s age or position in life, we ask that our staff make serious commitments if they choose to work with us, which will be reciprocated by equal devotion to the cause from others.
In closing, we seek people eager for a challenge in taking on greater levels of responsibility, who are truly passionate about their craft as not just something they do for work but also for fun, and are genuinely interested in the humanitarian verticals that we work. If this sounds like you, we would really like to learn more about you.
