Senior Applied Scientist, PXT

About the role

Join the People eXperience Technology (PXT) Core Science team, an interdisciplinary group that leverages behavioral science, statistics, and machine learning to develop products, mechanisms, and process improvements that enhance the well-being of over a million Amazonians worldwide and their ability to deliver value for Amazon's customers. In this role, you will drive science design and technical implementation innovations across talent solution science work-streams, enhancing existing models and creating new ones to empower leaders with data-driven decisions.

Your work will span corporate, operations, and safety domains, utilizing modeling approaches such as linear models, tree-based methods, deep neural networks, and LLM-based solutions. You will develop end-to-end ML solutions, from problem formulation to deployment, while maintaining high scientific standards and technical excellence. Additionally, you will contribute to the team's science strategy, mentor junior scientists, and stay abreast of emerging AI/ML trends.

Responsibilities

• Model Development & Innovation: Design and implement novel GenAI/LLM solutions using foundation models (e.g., Claude, GPT) and AWS services including Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and other AWS AI/ML tools.
• Research & Experimentation: Conduct applied research to advance LLM applications, including prompt engineering, few-shot learning, fine-tuning, and model evaluation.
• Production Deployment: Build scalable, production-ready AI systems that serve millions of requests with high reliability, low latency, and cost efficiency.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical solutions and drive measurable impact.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor junior scientists, contribute to technical strategy, and establish best practices for GenAI development across the organization.
• Evaluation & Metrics: Design rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, bias, safety, and business impact.
• Documentation & Influence: Publish technical papers, create documentation, and influence both technical and non-technical audiences.

About the team

The People eXperience and Technology (PXT) Core Science Team combines expertise in machine learning, statistics, economics, behavioral science, engineering, and product development. The team focuses on proactively identifying mechanisms, process improvements, and products that improve both Amazon's operations and Amazonians' lives, well-being, and value of work. By developing and delivering measurable solutions through innovation and rapid prototyping, the team accelerates informed, accurate, and reliable decision-making backed by science and data.

The team is building a talent intelligence layer that fuses natural language understanding, network science, and large-scale predictive modeling into a unified platform. This platform continuously learns from how people work, collaborate, and grow across one of the world's largest and most complex workforces.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building machine learning models for business applications.
• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python, or a related language.
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, TensorFlow, numpy, scipy, etc.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark, etc.

Pay

USA, NY, New York: $183,800.00 - $248,700.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Seattle: $167,100.00 - $226,100.00 USD annually

Benefits

Amazon offers a comprehensive benefits package, including:

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, and optional supplemental life plans).
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Mental Health Support, and Medical Advice Line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).

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