Principal Applied Scientist - AI for Life Sciences, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences

Amazon is hiring a Principal Applied Scientist - AI for Life Sciences, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences in Seattle, United States. It pays $199k-$269k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this applied scientist role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Pay on this posting starts 19% higher than the typical applied scientist posting on Level.
The posting mentions PyTorch, JAX and RAG among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Amazon has 20,000+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Set scientific vision and research agenda for LLM reasoning, agentic AI, and biological model customization for life sciences at AWS.

PyTorchJAX

ragfine-tuningmachine-learninglarge-language-modelsagentic-reasoningbioinformaticsprotein-engineering

AWS Applied AI Solutions (AAIS) is building toward a future where every business innovates with Amazon AI teammates. To get there, we build AI solutions that improve human capabilities and transform entire business functions. We create end-to-end products that surprise and delight out-of-the-box, making complex things easy and hard things possible, with no cloud experience required. We start with customers who embrace the future and build bridges to meet the rest where they are. We pursue ambitious opportunities with conviction, and we are looking for builders who share that mindset.

The Team Join the next science revolution at AWS Life Sciences Applied AI Solutions where you'll work alongside world-class scientists to build AI that transforms how therapeutics are discovered, developed, and brought to patients.

We're out to revolutionize how medicines are discovered, developed, and brought to patients powered by a new generation of AI. Our team tackles some of the hardest open problems at the intersection of frontier AI and life sciences. We apply biological foundation models large language models and agentic reasoning systems to life sciences problems then put them into the hands of pharma biotech and diagnostics customers as applications and managed services they can fine-tune tailor and deploy on their own data. The science challenges are deep: how do you design agentic systems that reason correctly over complex biological regulatory and clinical logic? How do you enable customers to tailor foundation models to their proprietary data and get better outputs with less effort? How do you adapt models to reason faithfully in high-stakes scientific and regulatory domains?

Today we're focused on two areas. In drug design, our products (including Amazon Bio Discovery) accelerate discovery by giving bench scientists AI-guided protein engineering and antibody design capabilities. In clinical trials we're building AI that automates and optimizes regulatory and clinical development workflows. We combine frontier research with production-scale delivery to put breakthrough science into the hands of customers solving humanity's hardest problems.

We value scientific rigor encourage publication and support conference participation. If you want to do research that ships this is the team.

Key job responsibilities
• Set the scientific vision and research agenda for LLM reasoning, agentic AI, and biological model customization across the portfolio
• Innovate on LLM reasoning, planning, and agentic approaches for complex scientific and regulatory workflows
• Develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that enable customers to train better models on their own data with less effort
• Advance methods to adapt and extend biological foundation models for customer-specific therapeutic applications
• Solve open research problems in faithful reasoning, multi-step planning, and tool use in high-stakes scientific domains
• Partner with Life Sciences domain experts and customers to understand their hardest scientific challenges and translate those into tractable research problems
• Publish at top-tier venues and build the team's external scientific reputation
• Mentor applied scientists across the team while maintaining significant personal research contribution
• Collaborate with product and engineering to ensure research translates into shipped products that serve customers at scale
• Influence multi-year research roadmaps through deep scientific expertise and customer understanding

A day in the life
• Push a new reasoning approach into production that measurably improves outputs for a pharma customer's workflow
• Design and run experiments to validate a novel fine-tuning method then ship it as a capability customers can use immediately
• Unblock a delivery milestone by diagnosing why a model is failing on a new class of inputs and implementing a fix
• Meet with a customer's scientific team to scope what the next model release needs to do for them
• Review a teammate's experimental results sharpen the approach and help get it over the finish line
• Publish results from shipped work at a top venue closing the loop between research and impact
• Prototype a new idea that could become the next major capability in the product

About the team
Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred 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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that's why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.

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 in the cloud.

Here at AWS, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.

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, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.

Basic qualifications

- PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Biology, or related field
- Experience as a senior or principal-level applied scientist with a track record of solving complex technical problems
- Deep expertise in LLMs, reasoning systems, and agentic AI, including architecture design, training, fine-tuning, and optimization
- Strong publication record at top-tier ML or computational biology venues
- Demonstrated ability to innovate on model customization techniques (fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) and make models work for specific downstream applications
- Domain experience in life sciences, computational biology, or related scientific fields (protein engineering, antibody design, clinical data, or regulatory science)
- Experience translating research into products or services that others use (not just standalone publications)
- Experience building and launching 0-to-1 AI products or capabilities, from initial research through first customer delivery
- Excellent programming skills in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX), with a modern development practice that embraces AI-assisted coding and iteration

Preferred qualifications

- Experience building managed AI services or model-as-a-service offerings that scientists use directly
- Deep expertise in protein structure prediction, inverse folding, or antibody optimization using AI
- Demonstrated experience with clinical data standards or regulatory science
- Experience with model customization at scale: efficient fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval-augmented generation, or domain adaptation
- A history of mentoring senior scientists and helping them achieve career breakthroughs

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, WA, Seattle - 198,900.00 - 269,000.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Principal Applied Scientist - AI for Life Sciences, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences at Amazon rates 95 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Principal Applied Scientist - AI for Life Sciences, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $199k-$269k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on September 11, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

RAGFine-tuningMachine learningLarge Language ModelsAgentic ReasoningBioinformaticsProtein EngineeringPyTorch

Also common in applied scientist jobs at this level

C++Java Generative AI NLP TensorFlow Spark

Pay

This job starts at: $199k
Typical applied scientist job: $167k

This posting starts 19% above the typical applied scientist job. See applied scientist jobs

Questions you could be asked

How would you design a retrieval step so the model answers from real data instead of guessing?
Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where large language models was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where agentic reasoning was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: RAG, Fine-tuning, Machine learning, Large Language Models, and Agentic Reasoning. 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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