Principal Applied Scientist, PXT

Amazon • Austin, TX

1d • Onsite

About The Position

In this role, you will own the science strategy and technical vision for this intelligence layer, leading a team of applied scientists working across GenAI and predictive modeling. You will shape how heterogeneous signals — text, behavioral, network, temporal — come together to power talent applications at Amazon scale, from workforce forecasting to personalized development to compensation strategy. You will identify opportunities where science investment can have material impact on long-term objectives or annual goals and build consensus around needed investments, working comfortably across different modeling paradigms and data modalities to guide principal and senior scientists in their most challenging and strategic decisions while serving as the strategic science advisor to PXT leaders operating at the Director, VP, and SVP levels. As a hands-on leader, you will personally own development and delivery of the most complex science problems at the intersection of multiple ML disciplines, stay current with emergent AI/ML science and engineering trends to influence focus areas in a rapidly evolving landscape, and participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship, and leadership development.

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• 5+ years of industry or academic research experience
• Experience programming in Python or related language
• 5+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier conferences
• Extensive track record of leading technical projects
• Experience mentoring junior scientists and engineers
• Demonstrated expertise in deep learning and model development

Nice To Haves

• A track record of influencing software shipped at scale using your science expertise
• Experience working with real-world complex data sets and building models at Amazon scale

Responsibilities

• Lead technical initiatives in people science models, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas like foundation models for predictive modeling, efficient multi-modal LLMs, and zero-shot learning
• Design and implement novel ML architectures that push the boundaries of how workforce signals are represented, fused, and predicted at scale
• Guide technical direction for research initiatives across the team, ensuring robust performance in production environments serving hundreds of thousands of employees
• Mentor and develop senior scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions on the most complex cross-domain problems
• Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world talent applications
• Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies across teams, shaping the long-term platform architecture

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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior