Principal Applied Scientist, AGI Foundations, AGI Foundations

Principal Applied Scientist, AGI Foundations, AGI Foundations

As a Principal Scientist within the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) organization, you are a trusted part of the technical leadership. You bring business and industry context to science and technology decisions, set the standard for scientific excellence, and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms.

A Principal Applied Scientist will solicit differing views across the organization and are willing to change your mind as you learn more. Your artifacts are exemplary and often used as reference across organization. You are a hands‑on scientific leader; develop solutions that are exemplary in terms of algorithm design, clarity, model structure, efficiency, and extensibility; and tackle intrinsically hard problems, acquiring expertise as needed.

Principal Applied Scientists are expected to decompose complex problems into straightforward solutions. You amplify your impact by leading scientific reviews within your organization or at your location; and scrutinize and review experimental design, modeling, verification and other research procedures. You also probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding; align teams toward coherent strategies; and educate keeping the scientific community up to date on advanced techniques, state of the art approaches, the latest technologies, and trends.

AGI Principal Applied Scientists help managers guide the career growth of other scientists by mentoring and play a significant role in hiring and developing scientists and leads. You will play a critical role in driving the development of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies that can handle Amazon‑scale use cases and have a significant impact on our customers' experiences.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Define key research directions, invent new machine learning techniques, conduct rigorous experiments, and ensure that research is translated into practice.
• Develop long‑term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them.
• Participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development.
• Build scalable science and engineering solutions, and serve as a key scientific resource in full‑cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance).

Basic Qualifications

• Master's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or equivalent, or PhD.
• Experience in building complex, real‑time systems involving AI, ML, and NLP with successful delivery to customers.
• Experience with project delivery for large, cross‑functional projects with evolving requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD with specialization in Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, or Computational Cognitive Science.
• 10+ years of combined academic and research experience.
• First author research on scaling laws, evaluation metrics, data mixture optimization, data efficiency, or neural network architectures in top‑tier journals and conferences.
• Functional thought leader and sought after for key tech decisions.
• Experience influencing decisions at an executive level.
• Experience mentoring and training the research scientist community on complex technical issues.
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives.
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills with successful delivery to customers.

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.