As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Alexa AI team, you will define and drive the science roadmap for state-of-the-art conversational AI systems powered by large language models, directly impacting how millions of customers interact with Alexa daily. You'll lead the design of LLM fine-tuning, alignment, and agentic architectures that operate reliably at scale, owning end-to-end delivery from research formulation through production deployment. Working at the intersection of research and production, you'll translate state of the art advances into customer-facing features. Your work will span the full ML lifecycle: developing novel evaluation frameworks, building automated training pipelines, and conducting rigorous experimentation across diverse devices and endpoints.
Collaborating with engineering, product, and cross-functional science teams across Amazon, you'll tackle the team's most complex technical challenges while maintaining practical focus on customer value. This role offers the opportunity to publish at top-tier conferences, generate intellectual property, and see your innovations scale to one of the world's most popular voice assistants.
Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Alexa AI team:
- Define and drive the science roadmap for conversational AI capabilities powered by large language models
- Design, implement, and evaluate novel approaches to LLM fine-tuning, alignment (RLHF, DPO), and distillation for production deployment
- Architect agentic systems (multi-step reasoning, tool use, planning, and orchestration) that work reliably at scale
- Develop evaluation frameworks and methodologies that go beyond standard benchmarks to capture real-world conversational quality
- Translate research advances into customer-facing products, working closely with engineering, product, and cross-functional science teams
- Own end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous research initiatives from problem formulation through experimentation to production deployment, with minimal guidance
- Tackle the team's most complex technical problems while maintaining practical focus on customer value and solution generalizability
- Advance the team's scientific reputation through high-impact publications and presentations at top-tier internal and external venues, and generate intellectual property through patents
The applicable collective agreement for this role is CBA for employees of Telecommunication Sector. The position is classified at level 6 or above, depending on the candidate’s skills, competences and experience.
The minimum gross annual base salary for this position is listed below. The base salary listed corresponds to working on a full-time basis. For part-time hours, the salary will be pro-rated.
Amazon reserves the right to offer a higher salary and/or level, depending on the candidate's skills, competencies, and experience. Amazon's package may include a sign on payment. In addition, the candidate may be eligible to participate in a restricted stock unit scheme operated independently by Amazon.com Inc. in USA.
Your recruiting team will share final salary and any restricted stock unit scheme if applicable, depending on skills and requirements.
In addition to statutory benefits, and those applicable to the relevant CBA, company supplementary benefits may apply subject to further terms.
Italy- EUR104,500 gross annually.
A day in the life As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Alexa AI team, your day will involve leading cross-functional collaborations with engineering, product, and science teams to define the technical direction for our conversational assistant. You'll design experiments that shape the science roadmap, mentor junior scientists, and make high-judgment calls on architecture and deployment trade-offs. Working in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, you'll own end-to-end delivery of complex initiatives: from formulating novel research problems to presenting strategic recommendations to senior leadership. Your ability to influence across organizational boundaries will drive measurable customer impact while raising the bar for millions of customers.
About the team Alexa AI is building the science and technology behind Alexa+, Amazon's next-generation conversational assistant. Our team works at the intersection of large language models, reinforcement learning from human feedback and verifiable rewards, agentic architectures, and multilingual/multimodal understanding. We operate at massive scale: our models serve customers across dozens of languages and device types. If you want to push the frontier of conversational AI and see your work used by people every day, come join us.
Basic Qualifications
- Several years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in building large language models for business application
- Experience in building speech recognition, machine translation and natural language processing systems (e.g., commercial speech products or government speech projects)
- Usage of Generative AI tools to enhance workflow efficiency, with a willingness to learn effective agentic prompting and evaluation practices
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