Lead Frontier AI Scientist, Mission Lab

Amazon Inc.; Omaha (NE); On-site; USD 199,000 - 269,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon Web Services, Inc. in Arlington, VA, seeks a Principal Applied Scientist for the Mission AI Lab to lead end-to-end model adaptation, evaluation, and data pipelines. You will define success criteria, build production-ready systems, and work with engineers to push frontier models into real-world use.

The role requires deep ML expertise, a PhD, and a TS/SCI clearance, with mentorship responsibilities and server-grade compute experience. Competitive benefits are offered.

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 leading experienced scientists as well as mentoring junior members toward a business career track in a corporate setting.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end adaptation of frontier models for complex reasoning tasks, from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning in production systems.
• Define what 'good' means for each task, building evaluation sets, test harnesses, and metrics where no public benchmark exists.
• Build and own data pipelines turning raw operational data into high-signal training and evaluation sets with provenance and leakage controls.
• Judge when a problem needs a genuinely new method versus an extension of an existing one, with evidence.
• Choose training and adaptation methods, including parameter-efficient techniques, to maximize gains within compute budgets.
• Extend adapted models into new priority domains, ensuring transferability, generalization, and calibration under distribution shift.
• Run data-preparation and human-in-the-loop feedback loops with analysts to refine data and evaluations.
• Package methods and evaluations for reuse across the lab and Amazon's model teams.
• Represent the lab's science in reviews and communicate model capabilities and risks to leaders and stakeholders.

Skills

Predictive modeling

Java/C++/Python

Mentoring

Education

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

Tools

Java

C++

Python

LoRA-style fine-tuning

GPU training

Job description

Amazon Web Services, Inc. in Arlington, VA, seeks a Principal Applied Scientist for the Mission AI Lab to lead end-to-end model adaptation, evaluation, and data pipelines. You will define success criteria, build production-ready systems, and work with engineers to push frontier models into real-world use.

The role requires deep ML expertise, a PhD, and a TS/SCI clearance, with mentorship responsibilities and server-grade compute experience. Competitive benefits are offered.