Applied Scientist II, Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI)

Amazon • Bellevue, WA

1d

About The Position

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.

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.

Ready to work on AI safety challenges that define the industry!

Requirements

• Deep expertise in state-of-the-art NLP and 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
• 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 any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

Nice To Haves

• Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
• Experience in investigating, designing, prototyping, and delivering new and innovative system solutions

Responsibilities

• Architect breakthrough Responsible AI solutions that become industry benchmarks
• Pioneer algorithms that eliminate false information
• Design frameworks that hunt down vulnerabilities before bad actors find them
• Develop models that understand human values across every culture we serve
• Push the boundaries of model training—transforming bold research into production systems that protect millions of customers daily while withstanding attacks and delivering exceptional experiences
• Lead certification processes
• Advance optimization techniques
• Build evaluation systems that reason like humans
• Mentor the next generation of AI safety experts
• Partner with engineering to transform research into production-ready solutions
• Tackle complex optimization challenges
• Brainstorm with Product teams, translating ambitious visions into concrete objectives that drive real impact
• Shape critical deployment decisions as you review impactful work and guide go/no-go calls

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree