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Principal Applied Scientist, AAIS

Amazon.com Inc
  • Seattle, WA
    9 days ago

    Job Description

    AI assistants are getting genuinely good at remembering individuals: your preferences, your projects, the thread you left open last week. But that memory stops at the edge of one person"s usage. It doesn"t reach the level at which real work happens, where the knowledge that matters is spread across many people, where one person"s decision changes what everyone else should do next, and where nobody has the full picture. We"re building AI that operates at that level: a durable, accurate understanding of how a team works, used to make that team measurably faster.

    We are looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of that work. This is a broad, ambiguous, high-leverage charter. The problems span knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, retrieval, agentic behavior, and the measurement science needed to know whether any of it is working. You will not be handed a well-posed problem. You will decide which problems are worth posing.

    This is a science leadership role, not a solo research role. You will set direction and raise the scientific bar across a team of applied scientists and MLEs, while staying deep enough in the work to prototype an idea yourself and prove it on real data.

    Key job responsibilities

    Own the scientific strategy for how organizational knowledge is represented, kept current, and retrieved: extraction, entity resolution, deduplication, graph structure, and retrieval that unifies graph, semantic, keyword, and temporal search.

    Advance temporal reasoning. Knowledge changes: facts are revised, decisions are reversed, priorities move. Representing what superseded what and when, and preserving the provenance to distinguish confirmed information from inferred information, is among the hardest open problems in this space.

    Define the science of proactive behavior. When is it right for an AI system to interrupt a human? These are precision-critical problems where a false positive costs far more than a miss, and where the right threshold varies by team and by individual.

    Lead our measurement science. Build evaluation for completeness and correctness across a multi-component agentic system, converging on a small number of trustworthy primary metrics rather than a sprawl of component scores. Judge honestly when an offline gain is real and when it is an artifact of a sparse dataset.

    Build the data that doesn"t exist. The most valuable phenomena in this domain are also the rarest, which makes naturally occurring examples too scarce to learn from. Design synthetic and simulated data pipelines that generate controlled, realistic scenarios so these capabilities can be developed and tested at all.

    Own the learning loop. Turn human interaction into usable training signal, and set the direction for how the system improves from explicit feedback in the near term and from passive observation over the longer term.

    Make the efficiency calls. Decide where frontier models are required and where a smaller domain-tuned model is sufficient, and build the cost and capacity measurement that makes it a data-driven decision rather than an opinion.

    Raise the bar across the team. Mentor scientists, review designs, publish where the work merits it, and represent the science externally to customers and to the research community.

    A day in the life

    You might spend the morning in a design review arguing that a proposed approach won"t survive contact with real data, the afternoon writing a prototype yourself to demonstrate the alternative, and the end of the day convincing an engineer that the capability is worth a sprint. Our sequencing is deliberate: try the idea on intuition, validate it on real data by inspection, then measure it, then operationalize it. Scientists here are expected to identify a problem, justify it, recruit others to it, and drive it into production, across whatever parts of the system that requires. Ownership follows the problem, not the org chart.

    About the team

    We are a combined science, product, and engineering team building one product together. Scientists own capabilities end to end rather than individual components, because these problems don"t decompose cleanly: a single improvement typically touches extraction, storage, and retrieval at once. We invest in the tooling that makes that practical: local full-stack environments and sandboxed realistic data, so a scientist can go from idea to result in seconds rather than waiting on a deployment or on engineering support.

    The work is grounded in real usage rather than benchmarks alone, which is a rare combination for science this early: real users, real data, real feedback, and a genuinely unsolved research agenda.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationSeattle, 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

    Skills

    • Artificial Intelligence (AI)unmatched
    • Benchmarkingunmatched
    • Business Strategyunmatched
    • Customer/Client Researchunmatched
    • Data Managementunmatched
    • Data Setsunmatched
    • Human Interactionunmatched
    • Identify Issuesunmatched
    • Knowledge Representationunmatched
    • Leadershipunmatched
    • Machine Toolunmatched
    • Memory Hardwareunmatched
    • Mentoringunmatched
    • Metricsunmatched
    • Product Developmentunmatched
    • Product Engineeringunmatched
    • Prototypingunmatched
    • Search Engine Keywordsunmatched
    • Team Buildingunmatched
    • Test Plan/Scheduleunmatched

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