Jobs
QED aims to offer unique opportunities to talented coders, scientists, makers, and artists that wish to work alongside us in building 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 on agriculture, the environment, and human health in developing countries. We believe that these topics lie at the crux of many core challenges facing humanity, such as rural poverty in developing countries, epidemics of nutrient deficiency and disease, and armed conflict between nation-states over scarce natural resources. The general optimization problem is to balance the ballooning long-term needs of our population against our planet’s limited carrying capacity in the most sustainable way possible. This is an enormous problem that no one knows how to solve, and we do not claim to either. But we believe more technologists are needed in the search for solutions, and we wish to contribute. Our contributions may be small, but if we can bring more awareness to the clever application of technology to this area, perhaps the network effects over time can be large. And we believe this problem is more important 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.
Culture and Expectations
A few remarks on expectations and culture. The term “too big to fail” has been used to justify bailouts for large corporations. We propose an alternative mantra, which is, “too big to succeed”. When working at a large corporation, responsibilities can be obfuscated or diminished by the fact that many staff are only small cogs in a +50,000 cog machine. High levels of bureaucracy, minuscule project ownership, and constant meddling from business agents all make innovation very difficult.
The second contrarian mantra we are inventing is, “too small to fail”. While the paths that smaller companies take may be unconventional, we are also not allowed to fail, as no one is there to bail us out. Consequently, our expectations are at least comparable if not higher than that of many well-known tech companies, as inefficiencies cannot be sustained.
For these reasons, QED imposes 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 our 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, are truly passionate about their craft as not just something they do for work but also for fun, and are genuinely interested in the application verticals that we are working in. If this sounds like you, we would really like to learn more about you.
Job Openings
Most of our work is related to software engineering as our core competency. However, we are also looking for application analysts with excellent communications skills, and for exceptionally strong data scientists that are well trained in both traditional and algorithmic data modeling.
Below we list our Basic Requirements which should be satisfied by all staff. Afterwards, we describe our Core Application Verticals, Core Technical Verticals, [current] Core Programming Languages, and [current] Core Frameworks and Tools in use. We then list our current job openings which reference these sections.
Basic Requirements
Genuine interest in one of the Core Application Verticals.
High fluency in reading, speaking, and typing English.
Willingness to work with distributed multi-cultural teams.
Be readily available to chat on a regular basis as necessary.
Zero tolerance policy for racial, national, or sexual discrimination.
Core Application Verticals
- agriculture and food security
- environment and climate change
- medicine, health care, and social welfare
- planetary science
- legal reform and public policy
Core Technical Verticals
- web and mobile development
- UI/UX
- GIS
- data science
- computer vision
- NLP
- DSP
- physics and hardware design
Core Programming Languages
- Python
- Javascript
- R
- C++
Core Frameworks and Developer Tools
- Web: Django and React
- Mobile: React Native, Android
- CI: Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Ansible, Selenium
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Analysis: TensorFlow, Theano, Keras, R, scikit-learn, Storm, OpenCV, RDF
Software Engineer
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- Genuine interest in one of the Core Application Verticals.
- High fluency with at least one of the Core Programming Languages, developing strictly on open source platforms.
- Have a passion for software craftsmanship and writing clean code that is clear and maintainable in the long-term.
- Willingness to engage in regular code reviews.
- Be able to carry oral conversations about software design and software architecture.
- Strong knowledge of software design patterns, and the basics of efficient algorithms and data structures.
- Be willing to dedicate at least 20 hrs/week.
- Bonuses:
- Experience with coding/math competitions, or substantial domain expertise in one of the Core Technical Verticals or Core Application Verticals.
- Substantial experience working with React is a major plus due to current business needs.
Application Analyst
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- Support QED applications, including QC checks, and helping customers map use cases onto our platforms.
- Composition and improvements to both external and internal documentation on Company’s software and hardware applications.
- Research the quality of existing software being considered by QED either for usage or further development.
- Identify problems, diagnose causes, and resolve them or delegate their resolution to appropriate engineers with ticketing systems.
- Improve both external and internal documentation.
- Excellent fluency in reading, speaking, and typing English. Typing speed should be at least 50 wpm. Responsibilities will involve regular communications with management and possibly also customers.
- Ability to think skeptically and adversarially, and easily express yourself in this manner. This is essential to working effectively in the development space where there is an overabundance of ideas, most of which are no good!
- Sharp logical thinking skills.
- High fluency with spreadsheets and Excel.
- Applicants should have a high amount of information technology experience, working frequently with computers, mobile devices, and many different data formats in their personal lives, and be well-calibrated to the UX expectations of Generation Z.
- Some experience with both computer programming and mathematics is highly preferred to ensure efficient communication with developers.
- Dedicate at least 15 hrs/wk.
- Bonuses: Fluency in multiple foreign languages.
Software Security Engineer
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- Experience with executing security audits of web and mobile applications.
- +3 years of experience working as a security professional.
- Participate in tiger team exercises.
- Strong expertise in networking, secrets management, and the strengths and weaknesses of different IaaS providers.
Data Scientist
- Satisfaction of the Basic Requirements.
- +3 years of experience with both traditional statistical modeling and algorithmic data modeling.
- 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, R, and/or C++.
- 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.
Online Application Form
After reading about QED and considering the qualifications above, if you wish to apply, please use the online application form below.
Apply Now!
Alternatively, if for some reason you are too old-fashioned to use an electronic form, you can e-mail your curriculum vitae, github link, 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
- 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.
