Senior Applied Scientist, Alexa AI

Job summary
We’re looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist to help build industry-leading technologies that push forward the frontiers of conversational AI. Our team’s mission is to work with both internal and external teams to advance the state-of-the-art in conversational AI.

Key job responsibilities
As a Senior Applied Scientist with the Alexa Artificial Intelligence (AI) team, you will be responsible for developing novel algorithms that advance the state-of-the-art in areas such as natural understanding, dialog management, natural language generation, multimodal interaction, and knowledge acquisition. You will work with partner science and engineering teams across Alexa AI and Amazon more broadly to create machine learning architectures and frameworks that facilitate engagement of external teams on key research challenges for the field, through competitions such as the Alexa Prize challenges. You will help to define new challenges and develop novel approaches for evaluation and analytics on challenge data.




A day in the life
You will work in a hybrid and fast-paced organization where scientists and engineers work together to drive new technologies to production. You will collaborate with and mentor other scientists to raise the bar of scientific research in Amazon.

About the team
The Alexa AI team's mission is to invent the future generations of AI Assistants, leveraging internal and external research frontiers to explore and experiment with transformational innovations in AI, accelerate the science of multimodal conversational AI, make it scalable and generalizable, and discover the science and art of what is possible in Human-AI interaction. We strive to advance Amazon’s AI reputation, and partner with researchers and academic communities around the globe to pursue game-changing high-risk high-reward scientific concepts grounded in language understanding, and validate their technical merits through real-world interactive applications on the Alexa platform.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD degree with 4 years of applied research experience or a Masters degree and 6+ years of experience of applied research experience
• 3+ years of experience in building machine learning models for business application
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in building natural language processing, dialog management, or natural language generation systems
• 5+ years practical experience building machine learning systems
• Scientific thinking and the ability to invent
• Track record of thought leadership and contributions that have advanced the field
• Strong software engineering skills
• Excellent spoken and written communication skills

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.

Workers in New York City who perform in-person work or interact with the public in the course of business must show proof they have been fully vaccinated against COVID or request and receive approval for a reasonable accommodation, including medical or religious accommodation.