Principal Applied Scientist, AGI Customization

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The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Team is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Applied Scientist to support adoption and enable customization of the Amazon Nova models. The role focuses on developing state-of-the-art services and tools for model customization, including fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and knowledge distillation across large language models. As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will play a critical role in developing advanced customization capabilities that enable enterprises to build highly performant application-specific models without the need for training models from scratch. Your work will directly impact how companies and Amazon businesses leverage the Amazon Nova models for their specific use cases.

Key job responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• Lead the development of novel customization techniques including extended post-training, continued pre-training, and advanced knowledge distillation
  
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement enterprise-ready tooling for various training techniques on Amazon SageMaker
  
• Design and execute experiments to optimize model accuracy, latency, and cost across different customization approaches (SFT, DPO, PPO)
  
• Develop and enhance preference learning algorithms and training curricula for customer-specific applications
  
• Create robust evaluation frameworks for assessing model performance across different domains and use cases
  
• Contribute to the development of the Responsible AI toolkit, including creating training and evaluation datasets for model alignment
  
• Design and implement secure access mechanisms for early model checkpoints and weights
  
• Think big about the evolution of model customization technologies over a multi-year horizon, identifying new opportunities to enhance enterprise AI capabilities
  
• Communicate technical insights and results to both technical and non-technical stakeholders through presentations and documentation
  
• Monitor and analyze trends in AI to continuously refine the customization strategy, ensuring alignment with industry best practices and emerging standards
  

About the team

Amazon’s AGI team is focused on building foundational AI to solve real-world problems at scale, delivers value to all existing businesses in Amazon, and enables entirely new services and products for people and enterprises around the world.

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Graduate degree in Computer science/Math or related field. Experience in building complex, real-time systems involving AI, ML, and NLP with successful delivery to customers. Demonstrated track record of project delivery for large, cross-functional projects with evolving requirements. Excellent written and spoken communication skills.

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PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science with 10+ years of combined academic and research experience. First‑author research on scaling laws, evaluation metrics, data mixture optimization, data efficiency, neural network architectures in top-tier journals and conferences. Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions. Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues. Excellent written and spoken communication skills with successful delivery to customers

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.

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 $179,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $309,400/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.