Machine Learning Engineer

We’re Happy Scribe, a 100% bootstrapped and profitable startup based in Barcelona, on a mission to make the internet accessible.

We offer transcription and subtitling services that combine AI with the expertise of language professionals to create a 5-star product. We’re working on one of the fundamental problems of this decade: speech-to-text technology.

We’re 30 people at the moment, but growing fast and profitable and we’re building the team thoughtfully and with a lot of care.

For decades transcription at scale has been almost impossible, now with the advancement of ASR technology we are on the verge of having computers that understand speech better than humans. Today, almost all the infrastructure is in place but we’ll need remarkable engineering to pull it off.

What will be your mission as an ML Engineer at Happy Scribe?

Depending on your profile and career development preference, the nature of your work will vary a bit between improving infrastructure, improving our current AI models, or developing new ones. Some missions examples could be

• Build the scalable infrastructure needed for the transcription of the future — like identifying coupling and extracting concerns into small and scalable services.

• Push forward the state of the art of AI models — improve quality of deep learning models such as: speech-to-text, speaker recognition, transcription to subtitling conversion, computer vision

• Streamline Machine Learning operations — ****such as a tools to automatically update our models, benchmark competitors or automate every-day tasks.

• Improve the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems — for example finding bottlenecks in the transcription pipeline and optimizing them to reduce overall turnaround time.

This might be for you if…

• You have 2+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer (or researcher) or you have 2+ years experience as a Software Engineer with ML knowledge.

• You are passionate about Deep Learning, you are up-to-date with the latest research and you have strong foundations of the mathematics behind it.

• You’re product focused. You want to listen to customers, and build the product that will solve their needs.

• You care about the business implications of anything you build. You don’t go after the shiny stuff, but see it as a balance of craft, speed, and the bottom line.

• You love steep learning curves, and are not afraid to learn about subjects that are outside of the comfort zone. For example, you can learn most technologies as you go. You’re pragmatic about them, it’s about the tools and tradeoffs, not ideologies.

• You care about information security and design things with security in mind.

• You are excited about our engineering principles. Or at least curious about them, if they seem very different from what you’ve been doing in the past.

• You’re a great mentor, able to share your knowledge and upskill other team members. Bonus points if you have experience helping a junior engineer stretch their skills and learn fast.

• We have a language-agnostic approach to code and believe the best engineers can code in any language. Our stack is in Ruby on Rails, React and Python, but it’s not a requirement that you know how to work with them. We like to work with people who are more interested in the problem they’re solving than in the language they’re using to solve it. We use Heroku for infrastructure and AWS as a cloud.

🕊️ Happy Scribe is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from all people and all walks of life. We believe a diverse team will be key to our success and we strongly encourage applications from under-represented groups in tech and marginalised groups in general: women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+, parents, career changers, refugees, people with disabilities… we want to hear from you!

Company Culture

✨ Have an impact on millions of people — Change how users and language professionals make transcriptions, translations and subtitles.

👫 Work with a small team of bright people — When we talk with most people, they have a hard time understanding how we got so far with so few people. Looking at this, we’re close in ARR to a typical Series B company, but our ARR per employee is 10x the industry average.

🤝 A company culture built on trust, autonomy, and independence

🛫 Infinite runway, no investment pressure. We are 100% bootstrapped and profitable. Every penny spent comes from happy customers who are paying for a product they value. Many tech companies are laying off staff because they grew too fast and need funding to survive. We prioritised profitability and sustainable growth, and are not impacted by funding shortage.

🍽️ In-Person culture — We believe nothing beats the magic of great people working together in person, in and outside of working hours. We work together, and spend time together: expect laughter-filled conversations over shared meals. The rule of thumb is 80/20 (80% in the office and 20% where you want); you have flexibility to work from abroad or at home when needed.

✊ We make it work — Have kids? Live far away? Do you have a non-normative life setup? The thing we care the most about is the team. Once we know we want to work with you, we make it work and we can flex the 80/20 rule.

⏱️Flexible working hours — Work on the schedule that makes you the most happy and productive. Here’s more info.

🏰 Beautiful office in Gràcia — One of the best areas in Barcelona. Our offices are much more than just a place to work. We like to see them alive 24/7, filled with friends and creative activities. Want to organise a community event, a breakfast with other designers, developers, etc.? The place is yours. Take a sneak peek here.

✈️ Team Retreats — So far we’ve been to Paris, Mallorca, the Pyrenees, Aran Islands, Dublin, and Sweden, where we had a small island to ourselves!

🌏 International, English-only speaking environment — We’re building an international team and want to create an inclusive environment where anyone can join any conversation at any time, even if it’s just kitchen talk. That’s why you’ll find Italian, French or Catalan people talking in English to each other.

Perks and benefits

💰 Competitive salary — our salaries are in the top percentiles of the Barcelona startup scene.

📈 Equity — By joining the company when the team is so small, you’re helping us set the foundations of our future success. We’re asking you to come on an adventure, so if we find a treasure, we want you to get a piece.

🌏 €1,000 per year travel bonus — We live in a distributed world where most people have friends and family spread around the globe. We don’t want finances or distances to get in the way of spending time with the people you care about. This perk will help you stay closer to them.

🧠 Mental health support — We have partnered with Oliva to offer you the best mental health support, from day 1. You can access 1-1 online therapy as often as you need to and it’s 100% confidential.

🏖️ 30 days per year vacation time — To relax and recharge your batteries whenever you need to.

🚚 Visa sponsorship and Relocation help — We want to work with the best people, regardless of where they’re from. We’ll help with your relocation costs and getting set up in Barcelona and will sponsor your visa if needed.

💻 The hardware that you need to be most productive.

📚 1 book/mo + e-learning platforms, conferences or courses of your choice — We truly want you to learn.

🍏 Private Health Insurance – We have partnered with Alan to best take care of our team both in Barcelona and while they’re on the road, covering half of the full price of the medical coverage.

Interview Process

We see this as a two way process and value the time you invest in considering working with us. We are committed to replying to everyone who applies, giving feedback to everyone we interview, being respectful of your time and giving you all the information you need to be able to make a decision.

• Step 1 – Machine Learning Theoretical interview. 60 minutes. Interview around your background related to ML. You’ll have a chance to explain your past projects and we’ll make some questions related to ML theory.

• Step 2 – Technical Interview. 60-90 minutes. Live coding interview with 2 of our engineers, focused on a real world problem you might actually need to solve at Happy Scribe. No take home exercises or preparation required.

  • How does the technical interview work?

    The objective of the interview is to get an idea of how you think about a complex ML-related problem. See how you implement the main building blocks, how you think about common trade-offs, or how future proof your solution might be.

• Step 3 – Values fit interview. 60 minutes with a co-founder and another team member (it varies) to getting to know you better as a person, understand your values, how you collaborate, think and make decisions, and what makes you tick.

• Step 4 – Meet the team. 90-120 minutes. This is not really an interview, it’s an opportunity to meet some of the amazing people you’d be working with to help you know if you want to join our team.

Note – you might speak to different people than the ones noted here, but the steps remain the same. In some cases we might ask for an additional conversation to go deeper into certain topics if we think it can add value.