14 DAY TRIAL // Following rumors of Apple working on enhanced "voice navigation" features the iPhone, Apple has posted three separate job openings for “iOS Speech Operations Engineer,” in what is clearly an attempt to beef up the company’s development teams focusing on voice control in iOS. However, an opening for “iPhone Sync QA Engineer” hints at the next-generation iPhone itself.
According to Apple’s description of the “iOS Speech Operations Engineer” position, the company’s iOS Application Frameworks team is looking for a Speech Server Engineer with exceptional know-how.
“You will deploy large-scale Speech systems and design/implement monitoring for lab, sandbox, and production environments. This position involves a wide variety of skills and innovation,” the text reads.
Requirements include a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field; a minimum of 5 years experience working with Linux/Unix systems; management of Speech Servers; implementing and testing disaster recovery mechanisms; the ability to recognize trends and patterns between diverse service request descriptions and foresee future problems, and others.
Preferred skills and experience include deploying and configuring large numbers of Xen VM instances; a demonstrated experience working with ssh, kickstart, bind, postfix, nagios; iptables, sed, awk, curl; knowledge of Nuance Recognizer, IBM WebSphere Voice, Google Voice, and other voice search solutions.
As for the role of “iPhone Sync QA Engineer”, Apple notes that “The iPhone Quality team is looking for a motivated, highly-technical sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills.”
The recruit is to join “a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products,” the advertisement reads on.
Apple then notes (emphasis ours): “Your focus will be testing sync functionality in Apple’s innovative new phone. The successful candidate will complete both documented and adhoc testing to ensure high quality releases.”