AmazonPosted 1w ago

Applied Scientist, AGI/AI Security

Applied Scientist, AGI/AI Security at Amazon scores 88 out of 100 on AI centrality, which makes it AI Level 4 of 4 (Builds AI) on this board. The level measures how much of the work is AI, not seniority.

US, WA, Seattlemidfull-time$172k-$223k

AI in this role

ai-agentsnlp

We are seeking an Applied Scientist to contribute to research and development of novel security validation and monitoring techniques for AI systems at scale. You will own and contribute to four critical work-streams:

1. Real-Time Agent Monitoring
Design and implement scientific approaches for continuous behavioral analysis of AI agents in production—detecting anomalous actions, prompt injection exploitation, and policy violations in real time.

2. Protection & Automated Remediation
Invent and deliver novel protection technologies and automated remediation techniques building on research in security, cryptography, privacy, automated reasoning, and others domains, to enable safe and secure agentic AI models and AI applications.

3. AI Application and Capabilities Validation
Invent and deliver scalable methodologies for security testing of AI applications and AI capabilities (e.g. MCP, skills), including adversarial robustness evaluation, safety guardrail bypass detection, tool-use authorization boundaries, and trust boundary verification.

4. AI Asset Discovery & Inventory
Research and build scalable techniques to automatically discover, identify, and catalog all AI-enabled applications, services, and capabilities across the company—maintaining a comprehensive, continuously updated database of AI assets.

Key job responsibilities
Invent
• Identify and frame new research challenges in AI security where problems are ill-defined and require novel scientific paradigms at the product level.
• Contribute to the team's scientific agenda for agent monitoring, protection, remediation, validation research, and AI asset discovery.
• Publish research results at peer-reviewed internal and external venues (e.g., USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, NeurIPS, ICML security workshops, ICSE, PETS) when appropriate.
• Articulate key scientific challenges of current and future AI security threats and deliver novel research to address them.
• Design, implementation, and successful delivery of scientifically complex security solutions into production—both brand new systems and evolutions of existing ones.
• Write significant portions of critical-path code for detection models, validation engines, protection technologies, and asset discovery / classification systems.
• Assess and select appropriate technologies (e.g., data protection, private inference, graph-based anomaly detection, NLP-based service classification, code/traffic analysis for AI fingerprinting) for production systems.
• Use best practices in scientific methodology and software engineering across the team; provide insightful peer reviews of code, design, and architecture artifacts.
• Deliver solutions that are inventive, maintainable, scalable, and extensible.
Influence
• Autonomously drive discussions with security engineers, software engineers, product managers, and scientist peers across multiple teams.
• Build consensus on larger cross-team security initiatives and factor complex efforts into independent workstreams.
• Identify and resolve endemic problems, including areas where current security tooling limits innovation of partner teams.
• Contribute to the broader internal and external scientific communities as a subject matter expert in AI security.

About the team
Diverse Experiences
Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

Why Amazon Security?
At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon’s products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores.

Inclusive Team Culture
In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Training & Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.

Work/Life Balance
We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.

Basic qualifications

- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

Preferred qualifications

- Experience using Unix/Linux
- Experience in professional software development

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

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.

USA, NY, New York - 172,400.00 - 223,400.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually

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A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI AgentsNlp

Questions you could be asked

How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
What NLP problem have you worked on, and how did you measure whether it actually worked?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Agents and Nlp. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped — this role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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