Sr Software Developer (Analytics Performance Engineer)

Nice to meet you!

We’re a leader in data and AI. Through our software and services, we inspire customers around the world to transform data into intelligence – and questions into answers.We’re also a debt-free multi-billion-dollar organization on our path to IPO-readiness. If you’re looking for a dynamic, fulfilling career coupled with flexibility and world-class employee experience, you’ll find it here.

About the job 

We are looking for passionate, driven, and team-oriented software developers to help push existing and emerging SAS analytics to new heights and frontiers in terms of performance and quality. We are a small passionate team that, at our heart, live for fast-paced problem-solving in any domain but are centered in SAS's advanced analytics division. Granted the freedom to move horizontally across the analytics domain, we work closely with diverse analytic teams, always learning and growing. What makes our team unique is our ability to wear multiple genre hats at the same time. In a sense, we are "tri-lingual," conversant, and comfortable working side-by-side with experts in hardware, software, and analytics simultaneously. This helps us partner with different analytics teams, applying an array of modern performance monitoring tools to better understand and find computational and performance bottlenecks.

Working directly with the analytic routines authors and/or owners, we can quickly learn the underlying mathematics for targeted regions of the algorithm. As a team, we next do deep internal and external searches to better understand what is happening with respect to the targeted hardware device as well as understand existing "work-arounds" used in the community. We then rapidly prototype and stress test new analytic sub-routines that can mitigate, if not eliminate, targeted performance issues, freeing partner teams to work at a higher level. We often work in the murky gap between compilers' current intelligence and the developer's true intention. The scope of what we do can vary on the needs of SAS, sometimes strategically touching only a few key subroutines/lines of code while at other times creating the entire analytic routine itself. Because we must move quickly horizontally across SAS analytic teams, we seek to minimize the legacy code we own ourselves, passing off encoded solutions to other teams who are more vertically oriented. Thus, we strongly adhere to the maxim "fall in love with the problem, not any one solution, including your own."

We are a small team, and each member comes with a unique critical skill set. For what we do to work, team members must place the needs of the team over the individual, building a culture of trust and respect. Because we often work on other people's software and code, the ability to project a sense of psychological safety is key. We are here to help and not to judge. In terms of the "big 5" personality traits, we thus seek individuals who are high in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. We have found that these combinations of psychological traits create an environment where rapid-pace hive-mind-like solutions to hard problems are created in near real-time.

As a Senior Software Developer, you will: 

• Work closely with diverse analytics teams at SAS

• Serve as tip of the spear on important proof of concept projects involving new technologies with an initial focus on quantum computing

• Tackle challenging problems that many feel are unsolvable or claim have been attempted before without success

• Think outside of the box when solving problems, looking for ways to "slice" rather than "untie" the proverbial Gordian knot.

• Develop high-speed analytic sub-routines.

• Become intimately familiar with available profiling and memory monitoring tools in a distributed, threaded, and hybrid computing world.

• Work on revising and/or implementing QPU adaptive hybrid algorithms in a distributed environment.

• Quickly come to speed on target elements of diverse analytical routines in terms of underlying mathematics, code realization, and corresponding underlying execution on hardware.

• Present, publish, and patent whenever possible and beneficial to SAS

• Work on improving quantum algorithms related to machine learning, statistics, and optimization.

• Collaborate with other analytic teams to help build and transform quantum research projects or ideas into production-level product features.

• Ensures all applicable security policies and processes are followed to support the organization's secure software development goals.

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research or a related discipline

• 8+ years of software development experience

• Strong computer programming skills with excellent analytical and problem-solving skills

• Deep understanding of linear algebra in relation to analytics

• Experience writing performant analytics routines in Python

• Experience developing with one or more quantum computing vendors such as qiskit

• Experience with quantum machine learning

• Experience in quantum circuit design

• Experience with quantum optimization

• Background in popular machine learning optimization algorithms

Preferred Qualifications 

• Understanding of popular quantum vendors and SDKs

• Knowledge and experience in Quantum Computing with an emphasis on optimization algorithms

• Experience with automated performance benchmarking strategies

• A high-level understanding of most machine learning algorithms with a deep knowledge of a few

• Background in logistic regression, support vector machines, decision trees, gradient boosting, random forest, PCA, etc.

• Background in mixed-integer optimization

• Background in large-scale nonlinear optimization

• Understanding of derivative-free optimization algorithms, strengths and limitations

World-class benefits    

Highlights include...

• Comprehensive medical, prescription, dental and vision plans.
• Medical plan options include…
• PPO with low annual deductible and copays.
• HDHP combined with a health savings account with a contribution from SAS (no access to on-site health care center).
• Onsite Health Care Center (HQ) that’s free to employees and family members enrolled in the PPO plan. There’s a pharmacy too! Not local to HQ? The pharmacy will ship prescriptions for no additional charge!
• An industry-leading 401k plan.
• Generous time away including vacation time, a variety of paid holidays, and our much-loved U.S. Winter Wellness Break between December 25 and January 1.
• Volunteer Time Off, parental leave and unlimited paid sick days.
• Generous childcare benefits for all full-time employees

Diverse and Inclusive

At SAS, it’s not about fitting into our culture – it’s about adding to it. We believe our people make the difference. Our diverse workforce brings together unique talents and inspires teams to create amazing software that reflects the diversity of our users and customers. Our commitment to diversity is a priority to our leadership, all the way up to the top; and it’s essential to who we are. To put it plainly: you are welcome here.

Additional Information

To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States, and should not require, now or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status. SAS is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law. Read more: Know Your Rights. Also view the Pay Transparency notice.

Resumes may be considered in the order they are received. SAS employees performing certain job functions may require access to technology or software subject to export or import regulations. To comply with these regulations, SAS may obtain nationality or citizenship information from applicants for employment. SAS collects this information solely for trade law compliance purposes and does not use it to discriminate unfairly in the hiring process.