Principal Applied Scientist, Alexa International Tech

Amazon Amazon · Big Tech · IN, KA, Bangalore · Applied Science

The Principal Applied Scientist role at Amazon's Alexa International team focuses on defining research directions, inventing and applying ML techniques, conducting experiments, publishing results, and translating research into practice for expanding Alexa's reach across countries, languages, devices, and cultures. The role requires a PhD in AI/ML/NLP with 10+ years of experience, a strong publication record, and expertise in building and deploying ML solutions at scale.

What you'd actually do

  1. Responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice.
  2. Develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them.
  3. Participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development.
  4. Technically ambitious with a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions.
  5. You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance).

Skills

Required

  • PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science
  • 10+ years of combined academic and research experience
  • Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences
  • Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions
  • Can successfully sell ideas to an executive level decision maker
  • Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues
  • Experience developing software in traditional programming languages (C++, Java, etc..)
  • Excellent written and spoken communication skills

Nice to have

  • Experience building and deploying innovative machine learning solutions at scale for minimum 10 years
  • Expert level skills across many Machine Learning methodologies
  • Published research work in academic conferences or industry circles
  • Experience delivering complex end-to-end global ML solutions that run at very large scale
  • Experience working with real-world data sets and building scalable models from big data
  • Thinks strategically, but stays on top of tactical execution
  • Exhibits excellent business judgment; balances business, product, and technology very well
  • This technical leader for machine learning will be an independent thinker who can make convincing, information-based arguments
  • With a strong bias for action, this individual will work equally well with science, engineering, economics and business teams
  • This person will have very sound judgment and be able to recruit and develop high calibre talent

What the JD emphasized

  • Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences.
  • Experience building and deploying innovative machine learning solutions at scale for minimum 10 years.
  • Published research work in academic conferences or industry circles.
  • Experience delivering complex end-to-end global ML solutions that run at very large scale.

Other signals

  • defining key research directions
  • adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques
  • rigorous experiments
  • publishing results
  • translating research into practice
  • building scalable science and engineering solutions
  • full-cycle development