Lead Frontier AI Scientist, Mission Lab

Amazon Science; Arlington (VA); On-site; USD 199,000 - 269,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Science in Arlington, VA is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to create frontier models for complex reasoning in a secure, scalable AI infrastructure. You will train on latest GPU hardware, define evaluation methods, and lead end-to-end model adaptation from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning in production systems.

This hands-on role requires shaping technical direction, mentoring researchers, and communicating limits and risks in plain terms to stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis.
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• 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
• Current TS/SCI US Government Security Clearance

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end adaptation of frontier models for complex reasoning tasks, from supervised fine-tuning and post-training through reinforcement learning, delivered as production systems people can rely on in the field
• Define what "good" means for each task, building the evaluation sets, test harnesses, and metrics that measure model quality where no public benchmark exists
• Build and own the data pipelines that turn raw operational data into high-signal training and evaluation sets, including curation, quality scoring, provenance tracking, and strict leakage and contamination controls
• Judge when a problem needs a genuinely new method versus an extension of an existing one, and make the call with evidence
• Choose the training and adaptation methods, including parameter-efficient techniques, that turn serious dedicated compute into the largest gains in capability
• Extend adapted models into new priority domains, owning transferability, generalization, and calibration under real-world distribution shift
• Run data-preparation and human-in-the-loop feedback loops with the analysts who know the problems best, turning their expertise into better data and sharper evaluations
• Package methods and evaluations so they can be reused as the lab's work grows, and shared with Amazon's model teams
• Represent the lab's science in technical reviews and to program and technical leaders, surfacing what the models can do and where the risks are
• Help set the technical bar for the lab, and mentor scientists as the team grows

Skills

Predictive modeling

Data analysis

Requirements gathering

Scientific leadership

Communication

Education

PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or related field

Tools

Java

C++

Python

Job description

Amazon Science in Arlington, VA is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to create frontier models for complex reasoning in a secure, scalable AI infrastructure. You will train on latest GPU hardware, define evaluation methods, and lead end-to-end model adaptation from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning in production systems.

This hands-on role requires shaping technical direction, mentoring researchers, and communicating limits and risks in plain terms to stakeholders.