Senior Applied Scientist, Real-Time Conversational AI , AGI

Amazon Science; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 192,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Science in Sunnyvale seeks a Senior Applied Scientist to advance real-time multimodal conversational AI, focusing on speech/audio foundation models and post-training reinforcement learning. You will own a research area through pre-training, architecture design, RL alignment, and deployment, collaborating with inference engineers for production-ready systems.

You will push scalable architectures, train large models, and develop evaluation frameworks to measure latency, audio quality, and

Qualifications

• 5+ years building ML models for business applications.
• PhD or Master’s degree with 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Hands-on experience training large-scale foundation models — direct involvement in model training.
• Experience with multimodal model architectures that jointly process or generate across speech, text, and audio modalities.
• Strong understanding of transformer architectures and their application to speech/audio domains.
• Publication record at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, or equivalent).
• Demonstrated ownership of a research area — driving technical direction for a workstream and collaborating effectively across scientists and engineers

Responsibilities

• Drive foundation model scaling for real-time multimodal speech and audio.
• Design and implement post-training RL methods and reward modeling for conversational AI.
• Develop real-time perception and generation capabilities handling concurrent input/output.
• Collaborate with inference engineers to ensure models are servable from inception and production-ready.
• Contribute to evaluation frameworks that capture latency, audio quality, prosody and naturalness.
• Publish and share research findings with cross-functional teams and external venues.

Skills

Java

C++

Python

Multimodal models

Transformer architectures

Research ownership

Publication track record

Education

PhD or Master’s with 6+ years experience

Job description

Description

We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to help drive the research and development of real-time multimodal conversational AI. You will contribute across two focus areas: advancing foundation models for speech and audio, and building the post-training systems (reward modeling, reinforcement learning) that shape natural, human-like conversational behavior.

You will own a significant research area and contribute across the full model lifecycle — from pre-training and architecture design through post-training alignment and real-time deployment. You will work at the frontier of what’s possible in conversational AI, with the compute, data, and runway to pursue problems that few teams in the world have the resources to tackle.

As a Senior Scientist, you will drive the technical execution of your research area, contribute to the team’s roadmap, and work closely with inference engineers to ensure your models are designed for real-time production deployment.

What You’ll Do

Foundation Model Scaling

• Help build and train large-scale multimodal foundation models for real-time speech and audio generation, from architecture design through production-scale training
• Advance the scaling and efficiency of conversational models, including the relationship between data, model size, and real-time performance
• Design model architectures informed by hardware constraints and inference requirements, working with inference engineers to ensure models are servable from inception
• Develop training methodologies for multimodal models that jointly process and generate speech, language, and audio in real-time streaming contexts
• Contribute to the state of the art on efficient architectures and training methods for conversational AI at scale

Post-Training & Reinforcement Learning

• Design and build reward models and reward functions for speech systems — capturing naturalness, fluency, conversational quality, and real-time responsiveness
• Develop and apply reinforcement learning methods to shape conversational behavior — teaching models natural timing, responsiveness, and fluid interaction
• Build parts of the post-training pipeline from SFT through RL alignment, optimized for real-time multimodal outputs rather than text-only generation
• Design evaluation frameworks that capture the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation (latency sensitivity, audio quality, prosody, interaction naturalness)

Real-Time Perception & Generation

• Advance the team’s capabilities in real-time perception — the ability of the model to process incoming audio/speech while simultaneously generating responses
• Develop techniques for natural interactive systems where the model handles concurrent input and output with human-like timing
• Work at the intersection of model architecture and production constraints to ensure multimodal capabilities function within hard real-time latency budgets

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
• PhD, or Master\'s degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Hands-on experience training large-scale foundation models — direct involvement in model training, not just using pre-trained models
• Experience with multimodal model architectures that jointly process or generate across speech, text, and audio modalities
• Strong understanding of transformer architectures and their application to speech/audio domains
• Publication record at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, or equivalent)
• Demonstrated ownership of a research area — driving technical direction for a workstream and collaborating effectively across scientists and engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building real-time AI systems — speech, audio, or video
• Track record with post-training methods: reinforcement learning, reward modeling, RLHF/RLAIF, or alignment techniques applied to generative models
• Experience with real-time interactive systems — models that handle concurrent input and output
• Experience building speech-to-speech or audio-to-audio generative models (codec models, autoregressive audio generation)
• Hands-on design of reward models or reward functions specifically for speech/audio quality, naturalness, or conversational behavior
• Experience with distributed training at scale — including parallelism strategies, training stability, and curriculum design
• Familiarity with hardware-informed model design — understanding how architecture choices affect inference latency, memory, and cost
• Background in speech recognition, speech synthesis (TTS), or speech enhancement
• Experience shipping research to production at scale — models serving real users, not just benchmark results
• Contributions to open-source speech/audio ML systems or widely used research codebases
• Experience mentoring junior scientists and engineers

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

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