Sr. Applied Scientist, Alexa Smart Home
Job Summary
You will define the research agenda for your area partner deeply with engineering to bring models into production and raise the scientific bar
across the broader team. You will work at the intersection of large language models agentic orchestration personalization and real-world heterogeneity across homes devices and occupants. This is a hands-on role: you will frame the problems build the models guide the system design and mentor other scientists while influencing product and technical roadmaps beyond your immediate team.
Key job responsibilities
- Independently identify frame and solve ill-defined research problems tied to broad Smart Home problem areas delivering with limited guidance.
- Define system-level technical requirements and partner with engineering teams to adapt scientific techniques to meet production constraints (latency cost reliability) making appropriate tradeoffs.
- Own the science strategy and roadmap for a workstream; anticipate future business and technical requirements.
- Design and run rigorous experimentation and evaluation to validate approaches and quantify customer/business impact.
- Build consensus on scientific approach and best practices across multiple teams; influence product features and technical direction beyond your own team.
- Actively mentor and develop other scientists and raise the bar in hiring.
- Contribute to the internal and external scientific community through publications patents and dissemination of scientific artifacts.
A day in the life
No two days look alike but the throughline is owning a scientific problem from question to production impact. You might dig into evaluation results to find where the experience falls short frame a hypothesis and prototype with LLMs or agentic techniques. You will pair with engineering to turn a promising model into a production-ready design weighing latency cost and reliability tradeoffs. Expect alignment with product managers on customer problems working sessions with fellow scientists and time mentoring teammates. Your customers are Alexa smart home users across millions of households; your stakeholders span product engineering and partner science teams.
About the team
We are the science team behind Alexas smart home experience. We are applied scientists and science engineers making the home genuinely intelligent: anticipatory personalized and effortless. Our mission is to move Alexa from reacting to commands toward understanding a households rhythms and acting helpfully on the customers behalf reliably and at scale. Because no two homes are alike we embrace that diversity rather than paper over it. We value research-grounded decisions hands-on work and long-horizon bets. Scientists own their areas end-to-end mentor one another publish and partner closely with engineering and product.
- 3 years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- PhD or Masters degree and 6 years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java C Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
- Experience with modeling tools such as R scikit-learn Spark MLLib MxNet Tensorflow numpy scipy etc.
- Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop Spark etc.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status disability or other legally protected status.
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 for more information. If the country/region youre applying in isnt listed please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. As a total compensation company Amazons package may include other elements such as sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience qualifications and location. Amazon offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical dental vision prescription basic life & AD&D insurance) Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) Deferred Profit Sharing Plan (DPSP) paid time off and other resources to improve health and well-being. We thank all applicants for their interest however only those interviewed will be advised as to hiring status.
CAN BC Vancouver - 195900.00 - 327200.00 CAD annually
Required Experience:
Senior IC
About Company
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