Principal Applied Scientist, Conversational Assistant Modeling & Learning

About the role

Alexa AI is looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the science behind Alexa+, Amazon's LLM-powered conversational assistant. You will own the technical direction for key initiatives spanning large language model fine-tuning, alignment, agentic reasoning, and evaluation — directly shaping the experience for hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.

As a Principal Scientist, you are a hands-on technical leader. You define research directions, design and run rigorous experiments, and ensure that research translates into production systems at scale. You decompose ambiguous, hard problems into clear solutions. Your code, models, and documents are exemplary and frequently referenced across the organization. You amplify your impact beyond your own work by leading scientific reviews, scrutinizing experimental design and modeling assumptions, and aligning teams toward coherent strategies. You mentor senior scientists, contribute significantly to hiring, and keep the broader scientific community current on state-of-the-art techniques. You bring business and industry context to technical decisions and can credibly present to executive leadership.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the science roadmap for conversational AI capabilities powered by large language models
• Design, implement, and evaluate novel approaches to LLM fine-tuning, alignment (RLHF, DPO), and distillation for production deployment
• Architect agentic systems — multi-step reasoning, tool use, planning, and orchestration — that work reliably at scale
• Develop 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
• Publish results at top-tier venues and represent Amazon in the broader research community
• Mentor scientists at all levels and contribute to organizational planning, hiring, and technical culture

About the team

Alexa AI is building the science and technology behind Alexa+, Amazon's next-generation conversational assistant. Our team works at the intersection of large language models, reinforcement learning from human feedback and verifiable rewards, agentic architectures, and multilingual/multimodal understanding. We operate at massive scale — our models serve customers across dozens of languages and device types.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis experience
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field
• Experience working in predictive modeling and analysis
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience with leading experienced scientists as well as having a record of developing junior members from academia or industry to a career track in a business environment

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant work in industry or academia experience
• Knowledge of problem solving, algorithm design and complexity analysis
• Experience creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art
• Peer-reviewed scientific contributions in premier journals and conferences

Pay

USA, WA, Bellevue - $198,900.00 - $269,000.00 USD annually

Benefits

• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, and optional 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 and parental leave

Learn more about our benefits at amazon.jobs/en/benefits.