AmazonPosted 6mo ago

Senior Applied Scientist , Alexa AI Aurora

Senior Applied Scientist , Alexa AI Aurora at Amazon scores 96 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, Bellevueseniorfull-time$167k-$226k

AI in this role

computer-visionnlpspeech

The Alexa AI, AURORA: Alexa Understanding, Runtime, ORchestration, and Applied sciences org is seeking a passionate, talented, and resourceful Senior Applied Scientist to invent and build scalable solutions for sate-of-the-art conversational AI. You will be working on advancing technologies in the fields of LLM, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP). As part of this role, you will collaborate with talented peers, have significant influence on our overall strategy as you guide and mentor Applied Scientists to create innovative and scalable solutions that touch millions of Alexa customers.
Creating reliable, scalable, and high performance products requires exceptional technical expertise, a sound understanding of the fundamentals of AI, and practical experience building large-scale machine learning systems. The ideal candidate will be a self-starter who can dive into a project with limited guidance and is able to design and implement inventive, simple solutions to complex problems. They will be passionate about new technologies and have a track record of delivering valuable software features and products in a fast-paced, highly iterative environment. A commitment to team work, hustle, and strong communication skills (to both business and technical partners) are absolute requirements.

Join us in our mission to shape the space of Generative AI and provide unparalleled experiences for our customers.

Key job responsibilities
• Define the science roadmap and advance core science primitives for conversation modelling, content generation, and automated quality assurance via state-of-the-art computer vision, machine learning, and generative AI
• Architect agentic systems, making high-judgment trade-offs across audio/text/visual quality, relevance, latency, cost, and long-term extensibility
• Establish evaluation frameworks, metrics, and success criteria for the team's scientific initiatives, institutionalizing rigorous validation across customer touch points
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous research initiatives from problem formulation through experimentation to production deployment, with minimal guidance
• Identify whitespace opportunities by staying at the forefront of AI/ML advances and translating them into actionable research directions with clear customer and business impact
• Drive development and deployment of scalable agentic systems for conversation understanding and generation, ensuring architectural decisions support long-term platform evolution
• Set and continuously raise the scientific and engineering bar across the team
• Tackle the team's most complex technical problems while maintaining practical focus on customer value and solution generalizability
• Advance the team's scientific reputation through high-impact publications and presentations at top-tier internal and external venues, and generate intellectual property through patents

About the team
AURORA is the AI runtime backbone and horizontal intelligence team that powers Alexa's core infrastructure, AI capabilities, and specialized conversational models. We revolutionize conversational AI through three core pillars: architecting mission-critical AI runtime systems, advancing science solutions that connect key conversational capabilities, and transforming how builders create at scale. We empower 1P and 3P engineers and scientists worldwide with modular, reusable platforms that accelerate innovation while delivering accurate, responsive, and reliable conversational experiences to millions of end-users through operational excellence at scale.

Basic qualifications

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

Preferred qualifications

- Experience in building machine learning models for business application
- Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.
- Experience in building speech recognition, machine translation and natural language processing systems (e.g., commercial speech products or government speech projects)
- Usage of Generative AI tools to enhance workflow efficiency, with a willingness to learn effective agentic prompting and evaluation practices

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, Bellevue - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually

Prepare for this job

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

Computer VisionNlpSpeech

Questions you could be asked

Walk me through a computer vision problem you solved, from raw data to a deployed model.
What NLP problem have you worked on, and how did you measure whether it actually worked?
What have you built with speech recognition or text-to-speech, and where did it break?
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: Computer Vision, Nlp, and Speech. 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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