Amazon AGI Lab is a frontier research and product team combining the speed of a startup with Amazon’s scale and resources. We build agents that can perceive, reason, and take action to complete real-world tasks.
The lab is designed to empower AI researchers and engineers to make major breakthroughs with speed and focus toward this goal. Each team in the lab has the autonomy to move fast and the long-term commitment to pursue high-risk, high-payoff research.
We're hiring a principal engineer who can take models from prototype to production and build the systems that make them run reliably at scale. The bar is end-to-end ownership: your work can range from working alongside researchers to build novel architectures, to being the person who decides what the agent runtime looks like, where the data lives, and how we know it's delivering value.
Key job responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for the team
- Partner closely with researchers to take emerging VLM and agent ideas from prototype to robust, instrumented systems that can be evaluated, improved, and scaled
- Create tooling that accelerates research and engineering velocity
- Raise the engineering bar for the team through technical design reviews, mentoring, principled architecture, high-quality code, observability, and operational excellence
- Influence the broader AGI organization by identifying reusable primitives, writing clear technical strategy, and creating systems that other teams can build on
- Be a thought leader & represent the lab externally by sharing ideas through thoughtful writing, conference talks, research publications, and open-source contributions, helping advance the field while raising the visibility and impact of the team’s work
Basic Qualifications
- Master’s degree and 6+ years of engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong programming experience in Python and at least one systems language (e.g. C++, Rust, Go).
- Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale software systems, ML systems, data platforms, agent infrastructure, or low-latency distributed systems.
- Experience with deep learning, machine learning, computer vision, multimodal models, information retrieval, or production ML infrastructure.
- Experience leading ambiguous, cross-functional technical projects from problem definition through implementation, evaluation, and delivery.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clarify ambiguous research problems, align stakeholders, and drive technical decisions.
- High judgment and ownership in fast-moving environments where the right answer may require a mix of research taste, systems thinking, product intuition, and engineering discipline.
Preferred Qualifications
- The strongest candidates may bring some of the following experiences. These are not required, but they are examples of backgrounds that could help someone thrive in this role.
- Experience building systems for video understanding, vision-language models
- Experience with ML engineering for production systems, including model serving, distributed training or fine-tuning, data pipelines, evals, and observability.
- Experience with search, ranking, embeddings, vector databases, ANN retrieval, metadata generation, or large-scale multimodal indexing.
- Experience with privacy-aware, secure, on-device, edge, or client-side ML systems.
- Experience with infrastructure such as Kubernetes, Ray, Spark, Kafka, GPU clusters, distributed storage, service orchestration, or high-throughput data processing.
- Experience taking early research ideas and turning them into reliable systems with measurable quality, latency, reliability, and cost characteristics.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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.
Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $255,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $345,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site