About Us

Shorthand exists to empower creative teams to produce and publish beautiful, transformative content radically faster. We’ve begun our journey by creating an easy-to-use platform for one of the most creatively and technically demanding use cases on the web — immersive feature stories — and we’re proud to count many of the world’s best known and most discerning publishers, brands, not-for-profits, and universities as loyal customers. With customers on every continent (except Antarctica!), there’s never been a more exciting time to join Shorthand. Our company has the rare distinction in this era of money-burning startups of being both investor-backed and comfortably profitable. We're a small team of geeks with art and heart and a high bar for quality.

To deliver our magic to customers and their audiences, we build software that is scalable, flexible, reliable and as simple as possible.

The Role

Shorthand is offering a 3-month paid intern position focusing on exploring innovative applications of computer vision and machine learning technology to immersive storytelling. This position is flexible with dates but expected to occur during the uni holidays.

Project 2: What Makes a Great Story?

A recurring question is whether we can automatically determine areas of potential improvement to stories that are likely to lead to wider readership and/or longer dwell times. Our goal is to remove the subjectivity of human opinion by applying machine learning methods to our library of published stories and their analytics.

This project would span the entirety of the Data Science/Machine Learning workflow, including stakeholder consultation, feature engineering, model fitting, evaluation, and potentially deployment. In particular, we would like to identify a set of semantic features in Shorthand stories that are both explainable to authors and quantifiably predictive of high story performance, develop appropriate regression and/or ML models, and present predictions for future story performance, along with the areas of potential improvement.

This project is available to students in their 3rd or 4th year, completing a degree in Data Science or equivalent.

We are looking for someone who:

*Is whip-smart and a fast learner, as demonstrated by career achievements and code school or university results.

*Is familiar with the foundations of Data Science, in particular statistics and causal inference.

*Has experience developing and evaluating machine learning models.

*Is familiar with basic software engineering principles.

*Has strong analytical skills and software development skills in Python.

*Has great communication skills in English, particularly with respect to writing.

*Has experience or interest in working in a remote small business or startup environment.

Core Responsibilities:

*Featuring engineering, including transforming data from JSON to tabular, and consulting SMEs to identify potential features.

*Identifying, training, and evaluating an appropriate machine learning model.

*Using statistical methods to provide model explainability and generating potential story improvements from this.

*Communicating your findings with stakeholders and the wider business.

Personality Attributes:

*You are a proactive self-starter who does not need to be told what to do and will be resourceful to find solutions to any challenge.

*You thrive in a fast-paced and demanding environment and possess a high level of intellectual curiosity.

*You are collaborative.

*You find fulfillment in the job itself and happiness in a job well done.

Application process

We value direct communication here at Shorthand and want to be transparent on how we hire. Our process for interns involves:

*An initial Zoom screen: You’ll have an initial Zoom meeting with the project supervisor to discuss your background, the role, what led you to apply, and assess your technical chops.

*Interview: You’ll have a second interview over Zoom with another of our team members who you would likely be working with day-to-day.

*Final checks: The successful candidate will undergo a reference and criminal background check prior to us sending the final employment agreement.

*Our workplace is 100% distributed and all interviews are conducted virtually unless otherwise advised. Please let us know of any reasonable accommodations you may need during the interview process.