Principal Applied Scientist, Conversational Assistant Modeling & Learning

Amazon • Bellevue, WA

3d

About The Position

Alexa AI is looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the science behind
Alexa+, Amazon's LLM-powered conversational assistant. You will own the
technical direction for key initiatives spanning large language model
fine-tuning, alignment, agentic reasoning, and evaluation — directly shaping the
experience for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

As a Principal Scientist, you are a hands-on technical leader. You define
research directions, design and run rigorous experiments, and ensure that
research translates into production systems at scale. You decompose ambiguous,
hard problems into clear solutions. Your code, models, and documents are
exemplary and frequently referenced across the organization.

You amplify your impact beyond your own work. You lead scientific reviews,
scrutinize experimental design and modeling assumptions, and align teams toward
coherent strategies. You mentor senior scientists, contribute significantly to
hiring, and keep the broader scientific community current on state-of-the-art
techniques. You bring business and industry context to technical decisions and
can credibly present to executive leadership.

Alexa AI is building the science and technology behind Alexa+, Amazon's
next-generation conversational assistant. Our team works at the intersection of
large language models, reinforcement learning from human feedback and verifiable
rewards, agentic architectures, and multilingual/multimodal understanding. We
operate at massive scale — our models serve customers across dozens of languages
and device types. If you want to push the frontier of conversational AI and see
your work used by people every day, come join us.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis experience
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field
• Experience working in predictive modeling and analysis
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience with leading experienced scientists as well as having a record of developing junior members from academia or industry to a career track in a business environment

Nice To Haves

• 10+ years of relevant work in industry or academia experience
• Knowledge of problem solving, algorithm design and complexity analysis
• Experience creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art
• Have peer-reviewed scientific contributions in premier journals and conferences

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the science roadmap for conversational AI capabilities powered by large language models
• Design, implement, and evaluate novel approaches to LLM fine-tuning, alignment (RLHF, DPO), and distillation for production deployment
• Architect agentic systems — multi-step reasoning, tool use, planning, and orchestration — that work reliably at scale
• Develop evaluation frameworks and methodologies that go beyond standard benchmarks to capture real-world conversational quality
• Translate research advances into customer-facing products, working closely with engineering, product, and cross-functional science teams
• Publish results at top-tier venues and represent Amazon in the broader research community
• Mentor scientists at all levels and contribute to organizational planning, hiring, and technical culture

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree