Principal Scientist, AI Knowledge Systems

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon Science in Seattle is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of knowledge-driven AI systems. This leadership role guides a team of applied scientists and MLEs, while staying hands-on to prototype ideas on real data.

You will define strategy for knowledge representation, retrieval, and temporal reasoning; advance proactive AI behavior; lead measurement, data generation, and learning loops; and mentor the team to ship impactful capabilities.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, Statistics or related field (or MSc with 8+ years applied science).
• 10+ years of experience building and shipping ML/AI systems with production use.
• Deep expertise in large language models and at least two areas (IR, knowledge graphs, RL, agentic systems, evaluation).
• Proven experience guiding technical and scientific direction for a scientist team.
• Hands-on Python prototyping in production codebases.
• Strong publication or patent track record.

Responsibilities

• Own scientific strategy for knowledge representation, retrieval, and graph structure.
• Advance temporal reasoning and provenance for information revisions.
• Define science of proactive behavior and AI-human interaction thresholds.
• Lead measurement and evaluation for multi-component agentic systems.
• Build synthetic data pipelines to enable testing on realistic scenarios.
• Own learning loop from human feedback to model improvement.
• Decide where frontier models are needed vs. domain-tuned variants.
• Mentor scientists, review designs, and represent science externally.

Skills

ML/AI systems leadership

LLM expertise

Knowledge graphs

Retrieval systems

Temporal reasoning

Technical mentoring

Python prototyping

Education

PhD in Computer Science, ML, Statistics

Master's + 8+ years applied science

Tools

Python

Job description

Amazon Science in Seattle is seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to own the scientific direction of knowledge-driven AI systems. This leadership role guides a team of applied scientists and MLEs, while staying hands-on to prototype ideas on real data.

You will define strategy for knowledge representation, retrieval, and temporal reasoning; advance proactive AI behavior; lead measurement, data generation, and learning loops; and mentor the team to ship impactful capabilities.