Principal Applied Scientist, Alexa International Tech

Amazon Amazon · Big Tech · Bellevue, WA · Applied Science

Principal Applied Scientist role focused on expanding Alexa's capabilities across new countries, languages, devices, and cultures. The role involves defining research directions, inventing/adopting ML techniques, conducting experiments, publishing results, and translating research into practice for customer-facing AI products. Requires a PhD, strong publication record, and extensive experience in building and deploying large-scale ML solutions. The role emphasizes technical leadership, mentorship, and strategic decision-making within the consumer AI domain.

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 in AI, NLP, ML, or computational cognitive science
  • 10+ years of combined academic and research experience
  • Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences
  • 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
  • independent thinker
  • strong bias for action
  • work equally well with science, engineering, economics and business teams
  • sound judgment
  • able to recruit and develop high calibre talent

What the JD emphasized

  • 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.
  • 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
  • translated into practice
  • building scalable science and engineering solutions
  • full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance)
  • expanding Alexa to new countries, languages, devices and cultures
  • innovative solutions
  • collaboration with hardware and software developers
  • building delightful experience for our customers
  • PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science
  • Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences
  • Functional thought leader
  • key tech decisions
  • sell ideas to an executive level decision maker
  • Mentors and trains the research scientist community
  • Experience developing software in traditional programming languages
  • Experience building and deploying innovative machine learning solutions at scale
  • 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
  • independent thinker
  • recruiting and developing high calibre talent