Senior Applied Scientist, Alexa AI

About the role

As a Senior Applied Scientist on the Alexa AI team, you will shape the scientific roadmap for next‑generation conversational AI powered by large language models. You will translate cutting‑edge research into customer‑facing features that impact millions of Alexa users worldwide.

Key responsibilities

• Define and drive the science roadmap for LLM‑based conversational capabilities.
• Design, implement, and evaluate novel approaches to LLM fine‑tuning, alignment (RLHF, DPO, RLVR), and model distillation for production.
• Architect agentic systems that support multi‑step reasoning, tool use, planning, and orchestration at scale.
• Develop evaluation frameworks that go beyond standard benchmarks to capture real‑world conversational quality.
• Translate research advances into production‑ready features, collaborating with engineering, product, and cross‑functional science teams.
• Own end‑to‑end delivery of ambiguous research initiatives from problem formulation through experimentation to deployment.
• Publish in top‑tier conferences, generate patents, and elevate the team’s scientific reputation.

Required profile

• Proven experience leading complex AI research projects from concept to production.
• Strong track record of publishing high‑impact papers and filing patents.
• Ability to solve hard technical problems while keeping customer value in focus.
• Self‑starter who can work with minimal guidance and drive cross‑functional collaboration.

Required skills

• Large language model fine‑tuning
• Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
• Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
• Reinforcement Learning with Value Regularization (RLVR)
• Model distillation for production deployment
• Design of agentic systems (multi‑step reasoning, tool use, planning)
• Evaluation framework development for conversational AI
• Automated training pipeline construction
• Rigorous experimentation and analysis

What we offer

• Competitive base salary with potential sign‑on payment.
• Opportunities to publish at top conferences and file patents.
• Impactful work on one of the world’s most popular voice assistants.
• Collaboration with leading engineers, product managers, and scientists across Amazon.