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Applied Scientist, Conversational Assistant Modeling and Learning

Amazon.com Inc
  • Bellevue, WA
    30+ days ago

    Job Description

    Alexa AI is looking for an Applied Scientist to build Alexa+, Amazon"s LLM-powered conversational assistant. You will work on key initiatives spanning large language model fine-tuning, alignment, agentic reasoning, and evaluation - directly shaping the experience for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

    A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Scientist, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You'll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with other scientists and engineers to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems.

    Key job responsibilities

    • Improve the efficiency of LLM, VLM, and agent training and evaluation pipelines, including distributed training, inference serving, data loading, checkpointing, memory usage, and GPU utilization.
    • 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
    • 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

    About the team

    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, 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.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationBellevue, WA
    IndustryRetail
    Company Size10,000 employees or more
    Year Founded1994
    Websitehttp://Amazon.com/militaryroles

    About Company

    At Amazon, we don’t wait for the next big idea to present itself. We envision the shape of impossible things and then we boldly make them reality. So far, this mindset has helped us achieve some incredible things. Let’s build new systems, challenge the status quo, and design the world we want to live in. We believe the work you do here will be the best work of your life.

    Wherever you are in your career exploration, Amazon likely has an opportunity for you. Our research scientists and engineers shape the future of natural language understanding with Alexa. Fulfillment center associates around the globe send customer orders from our warehouses to doorsteps. Product managers set feature requirements, strategy, and marketing messages for brand new customer experiences. And as we grow, we’ll add jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

    It’s Always Day 1
    At Amazon, it’s always “Day 1.” Now, what does this mean and why does it matter? It means that our approach remains the same as it was on Amazon’s very first day – to make smart, fast decisions, stay nimble, invent, and stay focused on delighting our customers. In our 2016 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared his thoughts on how to keep up a Day 1 company mindset. “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight,” he wrote. “A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.” You can read the full letter here

    Our Leadership Principles
    Our Leadership Principles help us keep a Day 1 mentality. They aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging. Amazonians use them, every day, whether they’re discussing ideas for new projects, deciding on the best solution for a customer’s problem, or interviewing candidates. To read through our Leadership Principles from Customer Obsession to Bias for Action, visit https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

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