Job Description
Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Through our family of apps and services, we're building a different kind of company that connects billions of people around the world, gives them ways to share what matters most to them, and helps bring people closer together. Whether we're creating new products or helping a small business expand its reach, people at Facebook are builders at heart. Our global teams are constantly iterating, solving problems, and working together to empower people around the world to build community and connect in meaningful ways. Together, we can help people build stronger communities - we're just getting started.Perception is at the center of our research, as it informs our work in displays, optics, rendering, and practically everything in the AR/VR system. Facebook is looking for an experienced leader who will be responsible for recruiting, career growth, maintaining organizational health and supporting the Visual Ergonomics (VE) group inside of Applied Perceptual Sciences (APS). This position is a dual role and requires personal research and collaboration with team members, in addition to guiding Visual Ergonomics projects and priorities. VE team’s core topics are:Product-driven exploration of visual performance, efficiency and comfort through a combination of psychophysical experiments, anthropometrics and modeling.Advancing and developing novel metrics to quantify user experience in terms of visual performance and comfort.Quantifying human variability in anthropometrics, physiology, and vision, in order to guide product development toward maximally inclusive solutions.Applied Perceptual Sciences influences AR/VR product development and system architecture by tackling some of the most difficult questions in vision science, perception, displays, and optics research. This involves surveying the field, setting priorities and then leading and conducting research at the intersection of basic and applied science, as it informs our research directions and identifies opportunities for revolutions in our metrics and experiences. You will be expected to improve the team's impact and capability with your ability to identify root questions that are shared across emerging product lines, your ability to champion team findings and your ability to scale the team with your substantial contacts in academia and industry. In APS, we are committed to a whole-system, multidisciplinary approach to perception research and have the opportunity to both collaborate with academic institutions as well as publish and disseminate our work. Projects take advantage of internal resources in mechanical, electrical, optical, and software engineering, allowing us to confront scientific and product engineering challenges which cannot necessarily be answered with existing products or prototypes.
Responsibilities
- Build, lead, mentor, inspire, and collaborate with a world-class perception team specializing in visual ergonomics.
- Guide and resource product-driven exploration of the visual system.
- Collaborate within APS and across Facebook leadership, engineering and research to build a long-term perceptual research strategy that spans multiple products and teams in AR & VR.
- Conduct your own significant studies, analysis and research.
- Work with your team and APS to rapidly sort through conflicting, ambiguous and time sensitive projects across multiple stakeholders to properly set scope and establish a coherent list of priorities that deliver the best results with limited resources.
- Expand your team's impact by holding discussions with product managers, technical leadership, engineering and research to look for additional applications for your team's research and findings.
- Continue developing a highly collaborative work environment inside of APS.
- 3+ years experience in leading, developing and managing technical teams, including performance management.
- 5+ years experience as a lead investigator with results demonstrated through publications, patents or shipped products.
- Advanced degree in vision science, perceptual psychology, human factors, or a related field.
- 3+ years experience in hardware design and prototyping hardware systems to simulate issues with proposed and novel display and hardware architecture.
- Detailed knowledge of specific aspects of the human visual system in a combination of the following areas: motion perception, binocular vision, computational modeling of the visual system, visual quality metrics, visual ergonomics, text legibility or spatial vision.
- Knowledge of standard metrics of human, performance or efficiency, and experience deriving new metrics for novel environments and/or display systems.
- Experience working with cross-functional teams to ship consumer hardware devices.
- Background in experimental design, psychophysical techniques, and user studies.
- PhD in vision science, perceptual psychology, human factors, biomedical engineering or a related field.
- 5+ years experience leading teams across a large complex organization.
- Multiple and on-going collaborations with both industry and academia resulting in significant findings.
- 5+ years experience with conducting user studies and testing protocols.
- Experience navigating perceptual and engineering tradespaces linked to a product release.
- Experience with hardware prototype design and experimentation, including test-beds and proof-of-concept devices.
- Experience with deriving new metrics based on business needs, including novel display architectures, graphics pipelines or environments.
- Experience with research publicized in high-impact journals and international conference presentations (SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, Journal of Vision, SID, Nature).