Working Student - Natural Language Processing Engineer (Project bricks)

At Kern AI, we're building an open-core developer-first platform for natural language processing. Ok, those are a lot of buzzwords. What does it mean?

• Open-core: Our products are partially open-sourced. This means that its source code can be seen on GitHub.
• Developer-first: We build for technical users. Our tools are designed to spark creativity, and to bridge gaps between ideas and implementations.
• Platform: We have more than one product, and they can be stacked together to improve the value chain. Still, we have one flagship product, which is our beloved refinery. You can find more info about it on our webpage. :)
• Natural language processing: We focus on textual data. May it be from emails, chat messages, job postings (like this one), or voice messages.

In a nutshell, with our platform, users and clients can build fascinating products, workflows, or data pipelines that actually understand human language. To give one example: a client of ours automates customer inquiries in that they a) detect the intent of client messages (e.g. a just-in-time logistics request), b) extract relevant information out of an inquiry, and c) then automatically draft a message based on the retrieved data synched with their internal IT systems. Cool, isn't it?

Currently, our team consists of 11 people. This means you can easily fit everyone to sit at one single table during lunch. Well, not always, because part of our team works remotely. 6 team members work from Bonn (Germany), 4 from Berlin, 1 from the "Schwarzwald". But we're happy to hire exceptional people within 2 hours +/- the CET time. In other words, we don't hire globally, but also not only locally.

You're helping us extend our open-source content library "bricks" (you can find it here: https://github.com/code-kern-ai/bricks). In other words, you are going to build tons of modular open-source Python functions that help our users go from an idea to an implementation quicker.

To give you some examples of bricks:

• we've got 2 implementations for sentiment analysis in Python
• or to detect the language in a text
• or even to generate new texts based on some input

It's quite fun building them, too :)

First things first. The core principles that can't be put into hard qualifications, but are important to us:

• You are a builder. This means that at the end of the day, when you're seeing a brick being merged into the main branch and thus going live, you should be so excited that you tell friends about it. Because you're proud of what you did :)
• As this is a working student position, you must still be studying somewhere (or are about to start studying)
• You should have good knowledge in Python and Git.

Now, that being said, when screening your application, we'll look into the following qualifications:

• You might already have gained some experience in NLP - but even if not, that's ok.
• You are happy to work on your own (i.e. you're a self-starter), but you're also happy to work in a team.
• It's cool if there is something that makes you stand out. To give you an idea, the team discusses along the hiring process with whom they talked to, and being able to say something like "Jane was the person who showed in a Loom video how she built a FastAPI sentiment analysis" of course will help you. Help us find that thing about you :)

There are lots of reasons to get excited about working for Kern AI. Here are some of them:

• Fastly growing open-source project in NLP, one of the arguably most exciting fields in computer science
• Ability to learn super fast, and play with state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-X and more
• 15€ per hour
• You can work from anywhere within CET ± 2 hours. We have offices in Berlin/Brandenburg and Bonn if you want to join on-site.
• MacOS, Windows or Linux? You can choose the equipment that works best for you.
• Working with a small team of highly passionate people is just incredible. You will be part of a great team. To give you some idea, on average, we have a 6.4 out of 7 happiness rating from our team members.

bricks is an open-source project with super simple ways to contribute. There's an obvious way to figure out how you can stand out - feel free to open an issue or PR on our repository. We'll love that for sure, though this obviously isn't mandatory. Just an easy way to stand out from the crowd!