Principal AI Scientist, Frontier Models & Security Lab

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

Job summary

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist for the Mission AI Lab in Arlington, VA.

You will tackle frontier-model challenges, design evaluation frameworks, and build scalable data pipelines, collaborating with engineers, analysts, and operators to push state-of-the-art AI capabilities for national security applications. You will lead hands-on research on training and evaluating models, explain limitations to stakeholders, and mentor junior scientists while operating in a

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

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end adaptation of frontier models for complex reasoning tasks, from supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning
• Define what good means for each task, building evaluation sets, test harnesses, and metrics
• Build and own data pipelines that turn raw operational data into high-signal training and evaluation sets
• Judge when a problem needs a genuinely new method versus an extension of an existing one
• Choose training and adaptation methods, including parameter-efficient techniques
• Extend adapted models into new priority domains, owning transferability and calibration
• Run data-preparation and human-in-the-loop feedback loops with analysts
• Package methods and evaluations for reuse across the lab
• Represent the lab's science in technical reviews and to leaders
• Help set the technical bar for the lab and mentor scientists

Skills

Predictive modeling

Model evaluation

Leadership of scientists

Stakeholder communication

Ambiguity handling

Strong math/ML fundamentals

Education

PhD in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science

Tools

Java

C++

Python

Job description

Amazon Web Services, Inc. is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist for the Mission AI Lab in Arlington, VA.

You will tackle frontier-model challenges, design evaluation frameworks, and build scalable data pipelines, collaborating with engineers, analysts, and operators to push state-of-the-art AI capabilities for national security applications. You will lead hands-on research on training and evaluating models, explain limitations to stakeholders, and mentor junior scientists while operating in a