Vancouver

Who we are Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly.

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

Where you will have an impact Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Vancouver office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Mountain View. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

Challenges you will own Work closely with team members to develop career plans and growth trajectories based on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses and their own aspirations. Work closely with project leads to ensure team members are having strong impact and are set up for success. Work closely with project leads and Science leadership to ensure projects are resourced in a way that balances the needs of the business with the needs of the individuals. Offer coaching and technical mentorship to direct reports (especially project leads). Bring technical & project management expertise and experience to help accelerate our progress and decision-making. Challenge the status quo (both technical and organisational/process). Prioritize effectively and keep processes lean and effective. Partner with leadership to maintain a culture of cross-boundary collaboration, impact, innovation, and health. Grow the team as a hiring manager, to bring in complementary, diverse skill sets and backgrounds. Anticipate the needs of the business 6-24 months out, identify areas where additional resources are needed or we need to grow new domain expertise, and pitch this to leadership for investment. Contribute to the day-to-day running of the Science team’s operations and larger collaborative efforts.

We are looking for a Research Engineer, with passion for working on cutting edge problems that can help us create highly realistic, emotional and life-like synthetic humans through text-to-video.

Our aim is to make video content creation available for all - not only to studio production!

🧑🏼‍🔬 You will be someone who loves to code and build working systems. You are used to working in a fast-paced start-up environment. You will have experience with the software development life cycle, from ideation through implementation, to testing and release. You will also have extensive knowledge and experience in Computer Vision domain. You will also have experience within Generative AI space (GANs, Diffusion models and the like!).

👩‍💼 You will join a group of more than 50 Engineers in the R&D department and will have the opportunity to collaborate with multiple research teams across diverse areas, our R&D research is guided by our co-founders - Prof. Lourdes Agapito and Prof. Matthias Niessner and director of Science Prof. Vittorio Ferrari.

If you know and love DALL.E, MUSE, IMAGEN, MAKE-A-VIDEO, STABLE DIFFUSION and more - and you love large data, large compute and writing clean code, then we would love to talk to you.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Overview Microsoft Research (MSR), a leading industrial research laboratory comprised of over 1,000 computer scientists working across the United States, United Kingdom, China, India, Canada, and the Netherlands.

We are currently seeking a Senior Researcher in the area of  Artificial Specialized Intelligence located in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a keen interest in developing cutting-edge large foundation models and post-training techniques for different domains and scenarios. This is an opportunity to drive an ambitious research agenda while collaborating with diverse teams to push for novel applications of those areas.  
  Over the past 30 years, our scientists have not only conducted world-class computer science research but also integrated advanced technologies into our products and services, positively impacting millions of lives and propelling Microsoft to the forefront of digital transformation.

Responsibilities Conduct cutting-edge research in large foundation models, focusing on applying large foundation models in specific domain. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate solutions into Artificial Intelligence (AI) -driven system. Develop and maintain research prototypes and software tools, ensuring that they are well-documented and adhere to best practices in software development. Publish research findings in top-tier conferences and journals and present your work at industry events. Collaborate with other AI researchers and engineers, sharing knowledge and expertise to foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning within the team.

You will join a team of 40+ Researchers and Engineers within the R&D Department working on cutting edge challenges in the Generative AI space, with a focus on creating highly realistic, emotional and life-like Synthetic humans through text-to-video. Within the team you’ll have the opportunity to work with different research teams and squads across multiple areas led by our Director of Science, Prof. Vittorio Ferrari, and directly impact our solutions that are used worldwide by over 55,000 businesses.

If you have seen the full ML lifecycle from ideation through implementation, testing and release, and you have a passion for large data, large model training and building solutions with clean code, this is your chance. This is an opportunity to work for a company that is impacting businesses at a rapid pace across the globe.

Location San Diego

Description

At Qualcomm, we are transforming the automotive industry with our Snapdragon Digital Chassis and building the next generation software defined vehicle (SDV).

Snapdragon Ride is an integral pillar of our Snapdragon Digital Chassis, and since its launch it has gained momentum with a growing number of global automakers and Tier1 suppliers. Snapdragon Ride aims to address the complexity of autonomous driving and ADAS by leveraging its high-performance, power-efficient SoC, industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and pioneering vision and drive policy stack to deliver a comprehensive, cost and energy efficient systems solution.

Enabling safe, comfortable, and affordable autonomous driving includes solving some of the most demanding and challenging technological problems. From centimeter-level localization to multimodal sensor perception, sensor fusion, behavior prediction, maneuver planning, and trajectory planning and control, each one of these functions introduces its own unique challenges to solve, verify, test, and deploy on the road.

We are looking for smart, innovative and motivated individuals with strong theory background in deep learning, advanced signal processing, probability & algorithms and good implementation skills in python/C++. Job responsibilities include design and development of novel algorithms for solving complex problems related to behavior prediction for autonomous driving, including trajectory and intention prediction. Develop novel deep learning models to predict trajectories for road users and optimize them to run-in real-time systems. Work closely with sensor fusion and planning team on defining requirements and KPIs. Work closely with test engineers to develop test plans for validating performance in simulations and real-world testing.

Minimum Qualifications: • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 6+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience. OR Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 5+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience. OR PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field and 4+ years of Systems Engineering or related work experience.Preferred Qualifications: Ph.D + 2 years industry experience in behavior and trajectory prediction Proficient in variety of deep learning models like CNN, Transformer, RNN, LSTM, VAE, GraphCNN etc Experience working with NLP Deep Learning Networks Proficient in state of the art in machine learning tools (pytorch, tensor flow) 3+ years of experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Python, etc. 3+ years Systems Engineering, or related work experience in the area of behavior and trajectory prediction. Experience working with, modifying, and creating advanced algorithms Analytical and scientific mindset, with the ability to solve complex problems. Experience in Autonomous driving, Robotics, XR/AR/VR Experience with robust software design for safety-critical systems Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ability to work with a cross-functional team

Mountain View

Who we are Established in 2017, Wayve is a leader in autonomous vehicle technology, driven by breakthroughs in Embodied AI. Our intelligent, mapless, and hardware-agnostic technologies empower vehicles to navigate complex environments effortlessly.

Supported by prominent investors, Wayve is advancing the transition from assisted to fully automated driving, making transportation safer, more efficient, and universally accessible. Join our world-class, multinational team of engineers and researchers as we push the boundaries of frontier AI and autonomous driving, creating impactful technologies and products on a global scale

Where you will have an impact We are looking for an experienced Research Engineer to help us in our journey to scale end-to-end neural networks for autonomous driving. You’ll be working across our research team to build, integrate, test and scale algorithms, tools, and machine learning solutions for autonomous driving.

What you will bring to Wayve 5+ years of software engineering experience in an industrial research environment Passion to work in a team on research ideas that have real world impact Strong software engineering experience in Python and other relevant languages (especially C++ and CUDA) Ideally with direct experience working in at least one of computer vision, robotics, simulation, graphics, large language models Ideally with several years working on large-scale machine learning algorithms and systems BS, MS, or above in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline or equivalent experience

What we offer you The chance to be part of a truly mission driven organisation and an opportunity to shape the future of autonomous driving. Unlike our competitors, Wayve is still relatively small and nimble, giving you the chance to make a huge impact Competitive compensation Fully employer-covered medical, dental and vision insurance! Further benefits such as catered lunch, yummy snacks, and variety of drinks, life insurance, employer contributed retirement account, therapy, yoga, office-wide socials and much more. A dynamic and fast-paced work environment in which you will grow every day - learning on the job, from the brightest minds in our space, and with support for more formal learning opportunities too A culture that is ego-free, respectful and welcoming (of you and your dog) - we even eat lunch together every day This is a full-time role based in our office in California. At Wayve we want the best of all worlds so we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, and time spent working from home. We also operate core working hours so you can be where you need to be for family and loved ones too. Teams determine the routines that work best for them.

Location Seattle, WA

Description To help a growing organization quickly deliver more efficient features to Prime Video customers, Prime Video’s READI organization is innovating on behalf of our global software development team consisting of thousands of engineers. The READI organization is building a team specialized in forecasting and recommendations. This team will apply supervised learning algorithms for forecasting multi-dimensional related time series using recurrent neural networks. The team will develop forecasts on key business dimensions and recommendations on performance and efficiency opportunities across our global software environment.

As a member of the team, you will apply your deep knowledge of machine learning to concrete problems that have broad cross-organizational, global, and technology impact. Your work will focus on retrieving, cleansing and preparing large scale datasets, training and evaluating models and deploying them for customers, where we continuously monitor and evaluate. You will work on large engineering efforts that solve significantly complex problems facing global customers. You will be trusted to operate with complete independence and are often assigned to focus on areas where the business and/or architectural strategy has not yet been defined. You must be equally comfortable digging in to business requirements as you are drilling into designs with development teams and developing ready-to-use learning models. You consistently bring strong, data-driven business and technical judgment to decisions.

Zoox is looking for a software engineer to join our Perception team and help us build novel architectures for classifying and understanding the complex and dynamic environments in our cities. In this role, you will have access to the best sensor data in the world and an incredible infrastructure for testing and validating your algorithms. We are creating new algorithms for segmentation, tracking, classification, and high-level scene understanding, and you could work on any (or all!) of these components.

We're looking for engineers with advanced degrees and experience building perception pipelines that work with real data in rapidly changing and uncertain environments.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview The Microsoft Research AI Frontiers group in Redmond is looking for a Senior Research Software Engineer to build state-of-the-art tools for evaluating and understanding foundation models, with a focus of real-world uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our team conducts influential research published at top-tier venues in AI and ML (including NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, and FAccT) and works within Microsoft’s Responsible AI ecosystem to impact our AI-driven technologies such as Azure, Office, and Bing.

We are seeking candidates with demonstrated ability for technical work in the space of large foundational models with proficient coding and machine learning skills. The preferred candidate is:

Passionate about rigorous evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models.
Motivated to make successful research methods accessible to the AI community through prototypes, open-source libraries, and development tools. Proficient in design thinking and Object Oriented Design (OOD), building clean, modular, maintainable and user-friendly open-source ML Experienced in measuring and maximizing the impact of open-source libraries.

As a Senior Research Software Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing and developing impactful, high quality and well-engineered frameworks to empower the scientific evaluation, understanding, and development of foundational models. You will work closely with a team of passionate researchers and engineers to make sure such frameworks are compatible with modern cloud platforms, Machine Learning (ML) frameworks and libraries, model architectures, and various data modalities. You will also play a central role in defining and running large-scale experiments that contribute to our team’s research.

We are looking for a team player interested in developing next-generation platforms and tools for Machine Learning (ML) as well as conducting state-of-the-art research. Topics of interest include but are not limited to rigorous evaluation and benchmarking, advances in AI interpretability, bias and fairness, and safety in real-world deployments. Our group takes a holistic approach to studying foundational models that includes a variety of data modalities (language, vision, multi-modal, and structured data) and modern model architectures. Candidates should demonstrate expertise in many of these aspects or show that they are interested in generalizing their skills into a variety of modalities and architectures.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, and we’re dedicated to this mission across every aspect of our company. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. Join us and help shape the future of the world.

Responsibilities Collaborate with a dedicated research and engineering team to design and develop ML frameworks for model evaluation and understanding.

• Define benchmarks and execute experiments for rigorous model evaluation and understanding.

• System Design and Object-Oriented Design: Envision elegant solutions and craft scalable and efficient systems to drive the success of our Machile Learning (ML) frameworks. Develop clean, modular, and maintainable code to shape the foundation of our evaluation framework.

• Work closely with partner engineering teams in both research and production.

• Mentor or onboard incoming engineering contributors and empower them to maximize the team’s impact.

Location Bellevue, WA

Description Are you excited about developing generative AI and foundation models to revolutionize automation, robotics and computer vision? Are you looking for opportunities to build and deploy them on real problems at truly vast scale? At Amazon Fulfillment Technologies and Robotics we are on a mission to build high-performance autonomous systems that perceive and act to further improve our world-class customer experience - at Amazon scale.

This role is for the AFT AI team which has deep expertise developing cutting edge AI solutions at scale and successfully applying them to business problems in the Amazon Fulfillment Network. These solutions typically utilize machine learning and computer vision techniques, applied to text, sequences of events, images or video from existing or new hardware. The team is comprised of scientists, who develop machine learning and computer vision solutions, analytics, who evaluate the expected business impact for a project and the performance of these solutions, and software engineers, who provide necessary support such as annotation pipelines and machine learning library development.

We are looking for an Applied Scientist with expertise in computer vision. You will work alongside other CV scientists, engineers, product managers and various stakeholders to deploy vision models at scale across a diverse set of initiatives. If you are a self-motivated individual with a zeal for customer obsession and ownership, and are passionate about applying computer vision for real world problems - this is the team for you.

At Zoox, you will collaborate with a team of world-class engineers with diverse backgrounds in areas such as AI, robotics, mechatronics, planning, control, localization, computer vision, rendering, simulation, distributed computing, design, and automated testing. You’ll master new technologies while working on code, algorithms, and research in your area of expertise to create and refine key systems and move Zoox forward.

Working at a startup gives you the chance to manifest your creativity and highly impact the final product.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Overview Are you interested in developing and optimizing deep learning systems? Are you interested in designing novel technology to accelerate their training and serving for cutting edge models and applications? Do you want to scale large Artificial Intelligence models to their limits on massive supercomputers? Are you interested in being part of an exciting open-source library for deep learning systems? The DeepSpeed team is hiring!

Microsoft's DeepSpeed is an open-source library built on the PyTorch (machine learning framework) ecosystem that combines numerous research innovations and technology advancements to make deep learning efficient and easier to use. DeepSpeed can parallelize across thousands of GPUs and train models with trillions of parameters. Our OSS (Open Source Software) has powered many advanced models like MT-530B and BLOOM, and it supports unprecedented scale and speed for both training and inference.

The DeepSpeed team is also part of the larger Microsoft AI at Scale initiative, which is pioneering the next-generation AI capabilities that are scaled across the company’s products and AI platforms.

The DeepSpeed team is looking for a Senior Researcher in Redmond, WA with passion for innovations and for building high-quality systems that will make significant impact inside and outside of Microsoft. Our team is highly collaborative, innovative, and end-user obsessed. We are looking for candidates with systems skills and passionate about driving innovations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of deep learning systems. We value creativity, agility, accountability, and a desire to learn new technologies.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities Excels in one or more subareas and gains expertise in a broad area of research. Identifies and articulates problems in an area of research that are academically novel and may directly or indirectly impact business opportunities. Collaborates with other relevant researchers or research groups to contribute to or advance a research agenda. Researches and develops an understanding of the state-of-the-art insights, tools, technologies, or methods being used in the research community. Expands collaborative relationships with relevant product and business groups inside or outside of Microsoft and provides expertise or technology to them.

Mountain View

Who we are Our team is the first in the world to use autonomous vehicles on public roads using end-to-end deep learning. With our multi-national world-class technical team, we’re building things differently.

We don’t think it’s scalable to tell an algorithm how to drive through hand-coded rules and expensive HD maps. Instead, we believe that using experience and data will allow our algorithms to be more intelligent: capable of easily adapting to new environments. Our aim is to be the future of self-driving cars: the first to deploy in 100 cities across the world bringing autonomy to everyone, everywhere.

Where you will have an impact: Science is the team that is advancing our end-to-end autonomous driving research. The team’s mission is to accelerate our journey to AV2.0 and ensure the future success of Wayve by incubating and investing in new ideas that have the potential to become game-changing technological advances for the company.

As the first Research Manager in our Mountain View office, you will be responsible for managing & scaling a strong Science team which is building our Wayve Foundational Model in collaboration with other Wayve science teams in London and Vancouver. You will provide coaching and guidance to each of the researchers and engineers within your team and work with leaders across the company to ensure sustainable career growth for your team during a period of growth in the company. You will participate in our project-based operating model where your focus will be unlocking the potential of your team and its technical leaders to drive industry-leading impact. As part of your work, you will help identify the right projects to invest in, ensure the right allocation of resources to those projects, keep the team in good health, provide technical feedback to your team, share progress to build momentum, and build alignment and strong collaboration across the wider Science organisation. We are actively hiring and aim to substantially grow our research team over the next two years and you will be at the heart of this.

What you’ll bring to Wayve Essential: Prior experience as a manager of research teams (10-15+ people) with a clear career interest towards management Passionate about fostering personal and professional growth in individual team members Experience with roadmap planning, stakeholder management, requirements gathering and alignment with peers towards milestones and deliverables Strong knowledge of Machine Learning and related areas, such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc. Industry experience with machine learning technology development which has had real-world product impact Experience driving a team and technical project through the full lifecycle, ideally within the language, vision or multimodal space Passionate about bringing research concepts through to product Research and engineering fundamentals MS or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar experience

Desirable: Experience managing the execution of a technical product Good experience working in a project-based (“matrix”) operating environment Proven track record of successfully delivering research projects and publications Experience working with robotics, self-driving, AR/VR, or LLMs Our offer Competitive compensation, on-site chef and bar, lots of fun socials, workplace nursery scheme, comprehensive private health insurance and more! Immersion in a team of world-class researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs. A position to shape the future of autonomous driving, and thus bring about a real world deployment of a breakthrough technology. Help relocating/travelling to London, with visa sponsorship. Flexible working hours - we trust you to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Captions is the AI-powered creative studio. Millions of creators around the world have used Captions to make their video content stand out from the pack and we're on a mission to empower the next billion.

Based in NYC, we are a team of ambitious, experienced, and devoted engineers, designers, and marketers. You'll be joining an early team where you'll have an outsized impact on both the product and company's culture.

We’re very fortunate to have some the best investors and entrepreneurs backing us, including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Uncommon Projects, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Antoine Martin, Julie Zhuo, Ben Rubin, Jaren Glover, SVAngel, 20VC, Ludlow Ventures, Chapter One, Lenny Rachitsky, and more.

Check out our latest milestone and our recent feature on the TODAY show and the New York Times.

** Please note that all of our roles will require you to be in-person at our NYC HQ (located in Union Square) **

Responsibilities:

Conduct research and develop models to advance the state-of-the-art in generative computer vision technologies, with a focus on creating highly realistic digital faces, bodies, avatars.

Strive to set new standards in the realism of 3D digital human appearance, movement, and personality, ensuring that generated content closely resembles real-life scenarios.

Implement techniques to achieve high-quality results in zero-shot or few-shot settings, as well as customized avatars for different use cases while maintaining speed and accuracy.

Develop innovative solutions to enable comprehensive customization of video content, including the creation of digital people, modifying scenes, and manipulating actions and speech within videos.

Preferred Qualifications:

PhD in computer science (or related field) and/ or 5+ years of industry experience.

Strong academic background with a focus on computer vision and transformers, specializing in NeRFs, Gaussian Splatting, Diffusion, GANs or related areas.

Publication Record: Highly relevant publication history, with a focus on generating or manipulating realistic digital faces, bodies, expressions, body movements, etc. Ideal candidates will have served as the primary author on these publications.

Expertise in Deep Learning: Proficiency in deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar, with hands-on experience in designing, training, and deploying neural networks for multimodal tasks.

Strong understanding of Computer Science fundamentals (algorithms and data structures).

Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans

Anything you need to do your best work

We’ve done team off-sites to places like Paris, London, Park City, Los Angeles, Upstate NY, and Nashville with more planned in the future.

Captions provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

Please note benefits apply to full time employees only.

San Jose, CA

B GARAGE was founded in 2017 by a Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University. After having spent over five years researching robotics, computer vision, aeronautics, and drone autonomy, the founder and team set their minds on building a future where aerial robots would become an integral part of our daily lives without anyone necessarily piloting them. Together, our common goal is to redefine the user experience of drones and to expand the horizon for the use of drones.

Roles and Responsibilities

Design and develop perception for aerial robot and inventory recognition for warehouses by leveraging computer vision and deep learning techniques

Aid the computer vision team to deliver prototype and product in a timely manner

Collaborate with other teams within the company

Minimum Qualifications

M.S. degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or other engineering disciplines

10+ years of experience with computer vision and machine learning

Proficient in image processing algorithms and multiple view geometry using camera

Experience with machine learning architectures for object detection, segmentation, text recognition etc.

Proficient with ROS, C++, and Python

Experience with popular computer vision and GPU frameworks/libraries (e.g., OpenCV,TensorFlow, PyTorch, CUDA, cuDNN etc.)

Proficient in containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) and container orchestration technologies

Experience in cloud computing platforms (AWS, GCP, etc.)

Experience with robots operating on real-time onboard processing

Self-motivated person who thrives in a fast-paced environment

Good problem solving and troubleshooting skills

Legally authorized to work in the United States

Optional Qualifications

Ph.D. degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, or other engineering disciplines

Experience with scene reconstruction, bundle adjustment and factor graph optimization libraries

Experience with Javascript and massively parallel cloud computing technologies involving Kafka, Spark, MapReduce

Published research papers in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, etc.

Company Benefits

Competitive compensation packages

Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, and 401(k)

Flexible vacation and paid holidays

Complimentary lunches and snacks

Professional development reimbursement (online courses, conference, exhibit, etc.)

B GARAGE stands for an open and respectful corporate culture because we believe diversity helps us to find new perspectives.

B GARAGE ensures that all our members have equal opportunities – regardless of age, ethnic origin and nationality, gender and gender identity, physical and mental abilities, religion and belief, sexual orientation, and social background. We always ensure diversity right from the recruitment stage and therefore make hiring decisions based on a candidate’s actual competencies, qualifications, and business needs at the point of the time.