Principal AI Scientist, Telco Tech, AWS Industries

Description

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is seeking a world-class Principal AI Scientist to lead cutting-edge research and development at the intersection of artificial intelligence and telecommunications network infrastructure. In this role, you will pioneer AI-native approaches to network modeling, reasoning, and optimization — shaping how the world's largest telecommunications operators harness AI to build, operate, and evolve next-generation networks. You will serve as the technical thought leader for network-domain AI science within AWS's telecommunications practice — defining strategy, driving research, and delivering production-ready solutions that unlock transformative business value for Tier-1 operators. This includes developing novel network models, ontologies, and AI architectures purpose-built for the telecommunications domain, and translating them into scalable offerings on the AWS platform.

This is a high-visibility role requiring deep hands-on expertise in building, training, and evaluating AI/ML models at scale, combined with mastery of telecommunications network architectures, protocols, and data systems. You will drive AI-Native 6G co-development with customers and represent AWS as a thought leader in global industry forums.

Key job responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end research and development of AI models for telecommunications networks — from architecture design, training methodology, and evaluation through optimization and production deployment on AWS.
• Design and develop network ontologies, knowledge graphs, and semantic representations that enable AI systems to reason over complex, multi-vendor, multi-domain network topologies.
• Develop and apply graph neural networks (GNNs), foundation models, transformer architectures, and other advanced AI techniques to network telemetry, configuration, and operational data.
• Drive AI-Native 6G co-development with Tier-1 telecommunications operators — translating their network AI challenges into research programs, proof-of-concept engagements, and scalable production solutions.
• Represent AWS as a technical thought leader in global industry forums and standards bodies — shaping the direction of AI for networks, publishing research, and positioning AWS as the platform of choice.
• Build deep partnerships with AWS Service Teams to integrate network AI capabilities into the broader AWS AI/ML and infrastructure platform.
• Author and deliver strategic narratives, science papers, and technical documents for AWS leadership and customer executives.
• Design privacy-preserving, distributed model training approaches that enable operators to leverage sensitive network data without centralization.
• Collaborate across a multidisciplinary team to support customer engagements, industry co-innovation programs, and developer scaling initiatives.
• Mentor and influence a community of Solutions Architects, Field Development Engineers, and partner engineers on AI/ML best practices for telecommunications.

A day in the life

You start your morning reviewing results from a model training run on network telemetry data. By mid-morning, you're whiteboarding a novel architecture with AWS service team engineers. After lunch, you join a call with a Tier-1 operator's CTO to scope a joint research initiative on autonomous network operations. In the afternoon, you draft a section of a strategic narrative for leadership, translating your research into business impact. You end the day reviewing a paper submission for an industry working group — knowing your science is shaping how the world builds 6G networks.

About the team

This role sits within AWS's Telecommunications practice, working at the frontier of AI-Native networking with Tier-1 global operators. The team co-develops next-generation network AI solutions in partnership with the world's leading telecommunications companies and industry bodies, spanning network intelligence, autonomous operations, and 6G research. This is a high-impact position with direct access to AWS leadership and senior customer executives. You will shape a multi-year technology and business strategy driving bleeding-edge data and AI research and development for the telecommunications industry.

Basic qualifications

• 10+ years of specific technology domain areas (e.g. software development, cloud computing, systems engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, data & analytics) experience
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics or equivalent
• Experience developing technology solutions and evangelising end-to-end technology roadmaps that guide IT transformations toward cloud computing
• Experience communicating across technical and non-technical audiences and at C-level, including training, workshops, publications

Preferred qualifications

• Knowledge of distributed systems design and implementation or equivalent
• Knowledge of large scale automation and workflow management or equivalent
• Knowledge of database design and implementation or equivalent
• Knowledge of presentations and whiteboarding skills with a high degree of comfort speaking with internal and external executives, IT management, and developers
• Experience architecting, migrating, transforming or modernizing customer requirements to the cloud

Pay

• USA, CA, Cupertino - 210,200.00 - 284,300.00 USD annually
• USA, NY, New York - 201,000.00 - 272,000.00 USD annually
• USA, TX, Dallas - 182,800.00 - 247,300.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Bellevue - 182,800.00 - 247,300.00 USD annually