Principal Applied Scientist, AWS Data Center Services

Application deadline: Oct 27, 2026. The AWS Data Center Services team is hiring a Principal Applied Scientist to innovate and advance the science behind solutions to problems in the rapidly growing AWS data center space. These problems range from bespoke computer vision models to support physical infrastructure functions such as repair activities, to increasing the certainty of decisions made by generative AI services without sacrificing latency or performance. For example, when a data center technician is triaging a critical electrical event at 2am and alarms cascade in seconds, the AI service must cross-reference topology, live readings, maintenance history, and design documents within minutes — work that today takes an order of magnitude more time and intervention from a senior engineer. As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will work backwards from these problems and partner with software development teams to deliver solutions, from selecting, training, and evolving computer vision models for targeted activities on AWS infrastructure inside data centers, to building smart retrieval algorithms, reducing model hallucination on safety-critical outcomes, continually improving latency and performance, and ensuring the generative AI service's knowledge stays current and the service constantly gets smarter beyond just knowledge retrieval.

Responsibilities

You start the morning reviewing traces from last night's incident triage. The agent correctly walked the topology to the upstream breaker but missed a recent maintenance change that was the real cause — so you design an experiment: does feeding work-order history into the traversal improve accuracy? You test it against historical incident data. Mid-morning, you review verification traces and catch the agent missing a spec deep in a submittal. After lunch, a field engineer walks you through manually cross-referencing five systems during an incident and you turn their scenario into a new benchmark. In the afternoon, you prototype cross-discipline reasoning: when a cascade spans electrical and cooling, can the lead agent delegate scoped investigations and still hold one coherent hypothesis? You publish results and draft a paper. You own the full lifecycle — research through production deployment.

About the team

Data Center Services is part of AWS Infrastructure Services that owns the design, planning, delivery, and operation of all AWS global infrastructure. The team supports all AWS data centers and all of the servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment that ensure customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. The team works on the most challenging problems, with thousands of variables impacting the supply chain, and comprises a diverse group of software, hardware, and network engineers, supply chain specialists, security experts, operations managers, and other vital roles. Collaboration spans AWS to deliver the highest standards for safety and security while providing seemingly infinite capacity at the lowest possible cost for customers, within an inclusive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers ownership to completion.

Requirements

• PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Statistics, or a highly quantitative field
• Strong problem-solving ability
• Good skills in Python (or similar language)
• Strong communication and data presentation skills
• Proven track record of delivery

Preferred qualifications

• 7+ years of industrial experience in predictive modeling and analysis, predictive software development
• Experience in Generative AI
• Publications or presentations in recognized Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or Data Mining journals/conferences
• Experience mentoring junior team members and guiding them on machine learning and data modeling applications
• Experience working with retail or e-commerce data
• Experience working with distributed systems and device-level software

Pay

Base salary ranges (annual):

• USA, CO, Denver: $198,900 – $269,000
• USA, WA, Seattle: $198,900 – $269,000

Compensation includes sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation determined based on experience, qualifications, and location.

Benefits

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription)
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with option for Supplemental life plans
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Mental Health Support
• Medical Advice Line
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Parental leave

Learn more at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.