Senior Applied Scientist: LLMs, Alignment & Agentic AI

Amazon; Factoria (WA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 226,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon's Alexa AI team is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to advance Alexa+, Amazon's LLM-powered conversational assistant. You will lead end-to-end projects from ideation to production, designing experiments and delivering scalable ML/NLP solutions.

You will collaborate across teams, mentor junior scientists, and help raise technical standards while focusing on measurable customer impact and real-world evaluation of model quality.

Qualifications

• PhD/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, NLP or related field, OR Master's with 5+ years industry experience.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience in applied ML, predictive modeling, or NLP.
• Strong programming skills in Python or a related language.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Track record of delivering ML/NLP solutions from research to production.
• Experience working with large language models (training, fine-tuning, or evaluation).

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and evaluate novel approaches to LLM fine-tuning, alignment (RLHF, DPO), and distillation for production deployment.
• Develop and improve agentic systems — including multi-step reasoning, tool use, planning, and orchestration — that work reliably at scale.
• Build evaluation frameworks and methodologies that go beyond standard benchmarks to capture real-world conversational quality.
• Translate research advances into customer-facing products, working closely with engineering, product, and cross-functional science teams.
• Analyze large-scale experimental results, identify patterns, and iterate rapidly on model improvements.
• Publish results at top-tier venues and contribute to Amazon's presence in the broader research community.
• Mentor junior scientists and contribute to hiring efforts.

Skills

Machine Learning

NLP

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Large Language Models

Communication

Mentoring

Education

PhD/MS in CS/EE/ML/NLP or related field with Master's +5 years experience

Tools

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Amazon's Alexa AI team is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to advance Alexa+, Amazon's LLM-powered conversational assistant. You will lead end-to-end projects from ideation to production, designing experiments and delivering scalable ML/NLP solutions.

You will collaborate across teams, mentor junior scientists, and help raise technical standards while focusing on measurable customer impact and real-world evaluation of model quality.