Careers

Interviewing at SIFT is like interviewing for a dozen dream jobs all at the same time. Every single project I heard about was fantastically interesting!

Smart Information Flow Technologies is a growing company, based in Minneapolis, MN, with staff in Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, San Diego, and Washington DC.  We are always open to a range of future highly motivated colleagues, from exceptionally qualified researchers with years of experience, to fresh Ph.D. or M.S. graduates, all the way to student interns looking to hone their skills.

Current Positions Available

 
RESEARCHER:
  • Position Description: Researcher (Cyber, AI and NLP)
  • Classification: Full-time employee (W-2) (Salary)
  • Location: Minneapolis, MN (headquarters) or Boston, MA
  • Qualifications:  For full-time, Researcher positions, applicants should have a Master’ s degree, Ph.D., or equivalent experience in a relevant field and should demonstrate more advanced proficiency in appropriate skills. Current high-need areas are binary analysis and NLP using BERT-like tools.
 
ASSOCIATE RESEARCHER:
  • Position Description: Associate Researcher (Cyber, AI and NLP)
  • Classification: Full-time employee (W-2) (Salary)
  • Location: Minneapolis, MN (headquarters) or Boston, MA
  • Qualifications: For full-time, Associate Researcher positions, applicants should have a Bachelor's degree.  Applicants should also demonstrate advanced proficiency in one or more related fields and the ability to quickly learn new problem domains, new coding languages, and the ability to rapidly produce new prototypes. 
 
RESEARCH INTERN:
  • Position Description: Research Intern (Cyber, AI and NLP)
  • Classification: Intern (Salaried)
  • Location: Minneapolis, MN (headquarters) or Boston, MA
  • Qualifications: SIFT internships are open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Internships are typically 6-12 months in duration, though we are willing to negotiate the term. SIFT interns have praised the range of development opportunities their internships offered—including opportunities to take a leading role in the design, implementation, and evaluation of applications, as well as roles in proposal preparation and even program management. Publication is encouraged and much of our work is suitable for dissertation research. Interested applicants will be offered the opportunity to contact previous interns to compare notes.

 

What do we do?

SIFT is all about cutting edge research and development in a variety of fields, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Automated Planning, Cybersecurity, Supervisory Control, Healthcare, and a range of Human-Automation Interaction technologies. We value research and innovation, creativity and interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems.

Our projects typically involve a mix of research and development. Applicants should expect to be exposed to a wide variety of tasks, ranging from requirements elicitation, design, implementation and testing/evaluation to research, proposal writing and concept development. Furthermore, ideal applicants should be comfortable assimilating ideas from research literature, expanding and refining such ideas, and developing prototype software for demonstrations and experiments.

Employment Restrictions

Due to the nature of our contract work, positions at SIFT are limited to US citizens or permanent residents.

Equal Opportunity

SIFT is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, pregnancy, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

Location & Work Environment

Our main office is in the historic warehouse district of downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. A vibrant metropolis, Minneapolis offers a wide variety of activities, diversity, and a friendly atmosphere. Qualified candidates are hired for other locations, principally our Boston office.

SIFT offers flexible work arrangements. SIFT employees have the option to work a substantial part of their hours in a home office, and hours are flexible to meet family needs, etc. We value the opportunity to work together with friendly, easygoing, creative researchers in a non-bureaucratic, flexible, and responsive way.

Skills

If you have some of the following specific skills they will be beneficial, but please understand you are not expected to have all these skills. If you have strengths in some subset, please read on; you are qualified to move to the next step.

Development/engineering skills:

  • Python, Lisp, HTML5, CSS, NodeJS, etc.
  • Constraint programming experience
  • Functional programming (e.g., SML, Ocaml, Haskell)

Key research experience:

  • AI planning methods (ideally both practical and theoretical experience)
  • Plan recognition
  • NLP
  • Computational linguistics (including semantics/relatedness, sentiment analysis and production)
  • Machine learning methods
  • Constraint satisfaction/optimization

Valued research experience (familiarity with some of these areas would be a plus in combination with knowledge of some of the above key areas):

  • Formal methods
  • Control theory
  • OR optimization techniques
  • Human/Computer Interaction and UI development
  • Simulation

If you have experience with proposal preparation and/or program management it is a plus, but not required. As our full-time employee you will have the opportunity to grow into securing/leading your own research and development programs.

To Apply

Please send your curriculum vitae and expression of interest to hiring [at] sift [dot] net.