Applied Scientist 2
Amazon
Applied Scientist 2
Amazon
Sells products online and rents cloud computing
Alexa+ is Amazon’s next-generation, AI-powered virtual assistant. Building on the original Alexa, it uses generative AI to deliver a more conversational, personalised, and effective experience. Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI) team is developing responsible AI (RAI) solutions for Alexa+, empowering it to provide useful information responsibly.
The Mission
Build AI safety systems that protect millions of Alexa customers every day. As conversational AI evolves, you'll solve challenging problems in Responsible AI by ensuring LLMs provide safe, trustworthy responses, building AI systems that understand nuanced human values across cultures, and maintaining customer trust at scale.
What You'll Build
You'll pioneer breakthrough solutions in Responsible AI at Amazon's scale. Imagine training models that set new safety standards, designing automated testing systems that hunt for vulnerabilities before they surface, and certifying the systems that power millions of daily conversations. You'll create intelligent evaluation systems that judge responses with human-level insight, build models that truly understand what makes interactions safe and delightful, and craft feedback mechanisms that help Alexa+ grasp the nuances of complex customer conversations. Here's where it gets even more exciting: you'll build AI agents that act as your team's safety net—automatically detecting and fixing production issues in real-time, often before anyone notices there was a problem. Your innovations won't just improve Alexa+; they'll fundamentally shape how it learns, evolves, and earns customer trust. As Alexa+ continues to delight customers, your work ensures it becomes more trustworthy, safer, and deeply aligned with customer needs and expectations.
Your work directly protects customer trust at Amazon's scale. Every innovation you create—from novel safety mechanisms to sophisticated evaluation techniques—shapes how millions of people interact with AI confidently. You're not just building products; you're defining industry standards for responsible AI.
This is frontier research with immediate real-world impact. You'll tackle problems that require innovative solutions: training models that remain truthful and grounded across diverse contexts, building reward models that capture the nuanced spectrum of human values across cultures and languages, and creating automated systems that continuously discover and address potential issues before customers encounter them. You'll collaborate with world-class scientists, product managers, and engineers to transform state-of-the-art ideas into production systems serving millions.
What We're Looking For
* Deep expertise in state-of-the-art NLP, Large Language Models
* Track record of building scalable ML systems
* Passion for impactful research—where frontier science meets real-world responsibility at scale
* Excitement about solving problems that will shape the future of AI
Ready to work on AI safety challenges that define the industry? Join us.
Key job responsibilities
The Responsible AI (RAI) team is at the forefront of building AI systems that are safe, ethical, and trustworthy. As an Applied Scientist-II, you'll be a key contributor to end-to-end Responsible AI solutions—developing and refining algorithms that detect and eliminate false information, building models that identify vulnerabilities exploited by bad actors, and training systems that understand human values across diverse cultures. Working alongside world-class engineers and scientists, you'll apply state-of-the-art NLP and computer vision techniques to content classification and safety challenges—turning cutting-edge research into production systems that protect millions of customers daily.
But here's what makes this role exciting: you'll grow into a future leader. You'll contribute to identifying, defining, and mitigating AI safety risks early—helping protect customers before they're impacted—while building deep expertise in responsible AI. You'll work within multi-agent architectures, implementing components where distributed AI systems maintain human oversight and control. Every model you build and every experiment you run—from consensus-driven reasoning modules to orchestration components—will directly strengthen trustworthy AI at the world's largest scale.
A day in the life
As a Responsible AI Scientist, you're at the frontier of AI safety—experimenting with breakthrough techniques that push the boundaries of what's possible. You partner with engineering to transform research into production-ready solutions, tackling complex optimization challenges. You brainstorm with Product teams, translating ambitious visions into concrete objectives that drive real impact. Your expertise shapes critical deployment decisions as you review impactful work and guide go/no-go calls. You mentor the next generation of AI safety leaders, watching ideas spark and capabilities grow. This is where science meets impact—building AI that's not just intelligent, but trustworthy and aligned with human values.
About the team
Our team pioneers Responsible AI for conversational assistants. We ensure Alexa delivers safe, trustworthy experiences across all devices, modalities, and languages worldwide. We work on frontier AI safety challenges—and we're looking for scientists who want to help shape the future of trustworthy AI.
The term “sensitive content” includes within its scope a wide range of categories of content such as offensive content (e.g., hate speech, racist speech), profanity, content that is suitable only for certain age groups, politically polarizing content, and religiously polarizing content. The term “content” refers to any material that is exposed to customers by Alexa (including both 1P and 3P experiences) and includes text, speech, audio, and video.
- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in state-of-the-art deep learning models architecture design and deep learning training and optimization and model pruning
- Experience using Unix/Linux
- Experience in professional software development
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.
Amazon runs the largest online store in the United States and rents cloud computing to businesses and governments through Amazon Web Services. AWS pioneered renting computing power over the internet, and Amazon built its own delivery network to get orders to customers quickly. Shoppers buy from Amazon and from independent sellers on its store, and Prime members pay a subscription for fast free shipping, streaming video and music, and other perks. AWS rents out computing power, storage, databases, and AI tools so companies can run software without owning servers, and Amazon also makes Kindle e-readers and Echo speakers with the Alexa assistant. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and it is based in Seattle, Washington.
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