Principal AI Scientist: Team Knowledge & Retrieval Leader

Amazon Web Services (AWS); Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 199,000 - 269,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. in Seattle seeks a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of projects spanning knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, and retrieval. This is a science leadership role with hands-on prototyping and production data practices.

You will lead a team of applied scientists and MLEs, set strategy, and contribute to evaluation methods while shipping impactful results on real data.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, Statistics, or related field (or a Master’s with 8 years of applied science experience).
• 10 years of experience building and shipping ML/AI systems reaching production users.
• Deep expertise in large language models and at least two of information retrieval, knowledge graphs, reinforcement learning, agentic system design, or evaluation methodology for generative systems.
• Proven experience setting technical and scientific direction for a team of scientists, including mentoring senior scientists.
• Hands-on proficiency in Python and the ability to prototype independently in a production codebase.
• Track record of publications, patents, or equivalent evidence of original scientific contribution.

Responsibilities

• Set the scientific direction for knowledge representation, retrieval, and graph-based search.
• Advance temporal reasoning and provenance to distinguish actual vs inferred data.
• Define when AI should interrupt humans; tune precision-recall for teams.
• Lead measurement: build evaluation across a multi-component agentic system.
• Design synthetic data pipelines to enable testing when real data is scarce.
• Own the learning loop from user feedback to production improvements.
• Decide when frontier models are needed vs domain-tuned models with cost metrics.
• Mentor scientists, review designs, publish work, and represent science externally.

Skills

Python proficiency

Production ML systems

Knowledge representation & graphs

Information retrieval

Reinforcement learning

Mentoring

Publications/patents

Team leadership

Education

PhD in Computer Science / ML / Statistics or related

Master’s + 8 years applied science experience

Tools

Python

Job description

Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. in Seattle seeks a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of projects spanning knowledge representation, temporal reasoning, and retrieval. This is a science leadership role with hands-on prototyping and production data practices.

You will lead a team of applied scientists and MLEs, set strategy, and contribute to evaluation methods while shipping impactful results on real data.