Principal Applied Scientist, Mission AI Lab, AWS Region Services
Amazon· Applied Science
Arlington, VA$198.9k - $269kFull-timePosted yesterday
About the role
Principal Applied Scientist responsible for advancing frontier models and mission-focused AI capabilities within AWS Region Services, including end-to-end model adaptation, data pipelines, evaluation, and collaboration with analysts and engineers. Role involves hands-on research, production-ready methods, and mentorship within the Mission AI Model Lab.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end adaptation of frontier models for complex reasoning tasks, from supervised fine-tuning and post-training through reinforcement learning, delivered as production systems people can rely on in the field
- Define what "good" means for each task, building the evaluation sets, test harnesses, and metrics that measure model quality where no public benchmark exists
- Build and own the data pipelines that turn raw operational data into high-signal training and evaluation sets, including curation, quality scoring, provenance tracking, and strict leakage and contamination controls
- Judge when a problem needs a genuinely new method versus an extension of an existing one, and make the call with evidence
- Choose the training and adaptation methods, including parameter-efficient techniques, that turn serious dedicated compute into the largest gains in capability
- Extend adapted models into new priority domains, owning transferability, generalization, and calibration under real-world distribution shift
- Run data-preparation and human-in-the-loop feedback loops with the analysts who know the problems best, turning their expertise into better data and sharper evaluations
- Package methods and evaluations so they can be reused as the lab's work grows, and shared with Amazon's model teams
- Represent the lab's science in technical reviews and to program and technical leaders, surfacing what the models can do and where the risks are
- Help set the technical bar for the lab, and mentor scientists as the team grows
Qualifications
- 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field
- Experience working in predictive modeling and analysis
- Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with leading experienced scientists as well as having a record of developing junior members from academia or industry to a career track in a business environment
Skills
Required:Hands-on predictive modelingModel training and evaluationData pipeline developmentLeadership / mentoring
Benefits
- Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription)
- Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Mental Health Support
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
- Parental leave
Last updated Oct 25, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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