Data Scientist

The Alexa Experience organization owns a number of programs and domains which drive high customer engagement and feature discovery, maintains customer trust, understands customers’ feedback, develops new features that provide utility value for customers with special needs, and develops locally relevant experiences. Our team develop and train natural language understanding models to improve these programs and to create new delighting Alexa experiences for customers.

We’re looking for a passionate scientist to help design, develop and release to production NLU models that provide the best-possible experience for our customers. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to develop new features and predict key user behaviors, both offline and in real time.

About the hiring group
We are a multi-disciplinary science team working on solving business needs leveraging state of the art approaches in natural language understanding (NLU) models, deep learning, reinforcement learning, causal inferences, and more, creating a rich and collaborative science environment.

Job responsibilities
What You Will Do:
· Be the subject matter expert in NLU model authoring process, guiding multiple product teams toward delivering best customer experiences on Alexa.
· Contribute to the design of new features by extending existing annotation schemas to cover new areas
· Develop and release to production Alexa NLU models
· Measure and analyze accuracy of models; develop solutions to improve performances
· Contribute to the research vision of the team, develop and execute on a roadmap that addresses the technical challenges our product teams face
· Raise the bar for research quality and impact. Stay up to date on research results both within and complementary to the Alexa technology space and helping your team and its partner to utilize tried patterns and state of the art results to work smarter and faster.
· Deliver reports and/or models to influence technical directions.
· Design processes and tools to simplify Alexa feature expansion for your team and partners.
· Perform data analysis, A/B experimentation and modeling with large data sets to develop insights that increase device usage and customer experience
· Collaborate with peers in data analysis and feature design efforts


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.

Basic Qualifications

· MS in Statistics, Applied Math, Computational Linguistics, or a related quantitative field; or, BS + 3 yrs experience
· 1+ years of experience with data scripting languages (e.g SQL, Python, R etc.)
· Experience using Unix/Linux.
· Dependable written and oral communication skills (English)

Preferred Qualifications

· Comprehensive knowledge of a relevant field of research, such as machine learning, statistical modeling, natural language understanding, machine translation
· Explicit (industry or academic) experience with natural language processing or similar
· Experience working effectively with science and data processing (engineering) teams
· Experience performing and interpreting A/B experiments a plus