Social
Machine learning

2019 Amazon Research Awards recipients announcement

Earlier this year, Amazon notified grant applicants who were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards.

By Amazon Research Awards team
June 17, 2020
6 min read
Share

Earlier this spring, Amazon notified grant applicants that they were recipients of the 2019 Amazon Research Awards, a grant program that provides up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 in AWS Promotional Credits to academic researchers investigating topics across 11 focus areas. Today, we’re publicly announcing the 51 award recipients who represent 39 universities in 10 countries. The 2019 awards averaged $72,000 in cash awards and $15,000 in AWS Promotional Credits in support of each research project. Each grant is intended to support the work of one to two graduate students or postdoctoral students for one year, under the supervision of a faculty member.

2019 Amazon Research Award recipients ARA.png

The 11 focus areas of this year’s research awards are computer vision; fairness in artificial intelligence; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural-language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; and security, privacy, and abuse prevention.

Recipients can use more than 150 Amazon public data sets. Amazon encourages the publication of research results, researcher presentations at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.

Each project is assigned an Amazon research contact who is available for consultation and supports the project’s progress.

“The Amazon Research Awards help fund outstanding, innovative research proposals across machine learning, robotics, operations research, and more, while helping strengthen connections between Amazon research teams, academic researchers, and their affiliated institutions,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Amazon Machine Learning. “The breadth and depth of the research this year’s recipients will pursue is impressive and will lead to critical innovations for our customers and meaningful scientific advancements in each of the 11 focus areas.”

Grant proposals for 2020, which will be the program’s sixth year, will be accepted starting this fall. Please check back for more information this summer or send an email to be added to the 2020 Call For Proposal distribution list. Below is the list of 2019 award recipients, presented in alphabetical order.

Recipient

University

Research title

Pulkit Agrawal

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Continual Reinforcement Learning

James Allan

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Explanation of Product Facets for Conversational Search

Chris Amato

Northeastern University

Scalable and Robust Multi-Robot Coordination through High-Level Macro-Actions

Ashis G. Banerjee

University of Washington

Sparse, Deep and Persistent Visual Features Based 3D Object Detection and 6D Pose Estimation in Indoor Environments

Sven Behnke

University of Bonn

Learning Structured Scene Modeling and Physics-Based Prediction for Manipulation

François-Xavier Briol

University College London & the Alan Turing Institute

Transfer Learning for Numerical Integration in Expensive Machine Learning Systems

Flavio du Pin Calmon

Harvard University

Building the Foundations of Fair Machine Learning: From Information Theory to Federated Algorithms

Luca Carlone

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Metric-Semantic SLAM for Long-Term Multi-Robot Deployment

Shayok Chakraborty

Florida State University

Deep Active Learning with Relative Label Feedback

Kai-Wei Chang

University of California Los Angeles

Learning Robust Contextual Language Encoders at Scale

Margarita Chli

ETH Zurich

Semantic-Aware Cloud-Aided Aerial Navigation for Drone Delivery

Jeff Dalton

University of Glasgow

Knowledge-Grounded Conversational Product Information Seeking

N. Lance Downing

Stanford University

DeepStroke: Improving Stroke Diagnosis with Deep Learning on NIH Stroke Scale Assessments

Luciana Ferrer

Computer Science Institute (ICC), UBA-CONICET

Representation Learning for Sound Understanding

Alexander Gammerman

Royal Holloway, University of London

Conformal Martingales for Change-Point Detection

Graeme Gange

Monash University

Robust Prioritised Planning for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Itai Gurvich

Cornell University

Dynamic Resource Allocation to Heterogeneous Requests: Near Optimal, Computationally Light Policies

Kris Hauser

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Robotic Packing of Novel and Non-Rigid Objects with Visuotactile Modeling

Daqing He

University of Pittsburgh

Transferable, Controllable, Applicable Keyphrase Generation

Jason Hong

Carnegie Mellon University

Designing Alternative Representations of Confusion Matrices to Evaluate Public Perceptions of Fairness in Machine Learning

Wendy Ju

Cornell Tech

Enabling Machines to Recognize and Repair Errors in Interaction

Sertac Karaman

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learning New Environments with a Tour: Depth and Pose Estimation through Informative Control Actions

Ioannis Karamouzas

Clemson University

Learning Efficient Multi-Robot Navigation from Human Crowd Data

Aryeh Kontorovich

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Advanced Proximity-Based Learning Toolkit for SageMaker

Oliver Kroemer

Carnegie Mellon University

Robust Manipulation Strategies for Delta-Robot Arrays

Beibei Li

Carnegie Mellon University

AI Agent for Targeted Promotion

Changliu Liu

Carnegie Mellon University

Hierarchical Motion Planning for Efficient and Provably Safe Human-Robot Interactions

Anirudha Majumdar

Princeton University

Force-Closure Nets: Manipulating Objects with Provable Guarantees on Generalization

Karthik Narasimhan

Princeton University

Towards Deeper, Broader and Human-Like Conversational Agents

Joseph P. Near

University of Vermont

Provable Fairness for Deep Learning via Automatic Differentiation

Priyadarshini Panda

Yale University

Adversarial Robustness with Efficiency-Driven Optimization of Deep Neural Networks

Guilherme Augsto Silva Pereira

West Virginia University

Parallel and Cloud Computing for Long-Term Robotics

Carlo Pinciroli

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

An Immersive Interface for Multi-User Supervision of Multi-Robot Operations

Ingmar Posner

University of Oxford

Compositional Deep Generative Models for Real-World Robot Perception and Manipulation

Amanda Prorok

University of Cambridge

Learning Explicit Communication for Multi-Robot Path Planning

Sebastian Risi

IT University of Copenhagen

Continually Learning Machines for Industrial Automation

Alessandro Rizzo

Politecnico di Torino

From Shortest to Safest Path Navigation: An AI-Powered Framework for Risk-Aware Autonomous Navigation of UASes

Nicolas Rojas

Imperial College London

Mechanical intelligence for in-hand manipulation

Daniela Rus

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Series Elastic Magnetically Geared Robotic Actuators

Sanjay Sarma

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Multi-modal Sensing for Material ID in Robotic Applications

Alex Schwing

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Seeing the Unseen: Temporal Amodal Instance Level Video Object Segmentation

Roland Siegwart

ETH Zürich

Aerial Manipulation with an Omnidirectional Flying Platform

Niko Suenderhauf

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Learning Robotic Navigation and Interaction from Object-based Semantic Maps

Chenhao Tan

University of Colorado at Boulder

Actively Soliciting Human Explanations to Correct Biases in NLP Models

Jian Tang

HEC Montreal: Mila-Quebec AI Institute

Deep Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Marynel Vázquez

Yale University

Improving Social Robot Navigation via Group Interaction Awareness

Soroush Vosoughi

Dartmouth College

Protecting Online Anonymity Through Linguistic Style Transfer

Richard M. Voyles

Purdue University

Framework for One-Shot Learning of Contact-Intensive Tasks Through Coaching

May Dongmei Wang

Georgia Institute of Technology

Learning to Unlearn Biases in Recommendation Models

James Wang

The Pennsylvania State University

Advancing Automated Recognition of Emotion in the Wild

Xinyu Xing

The Pennsylvania State University

Fine-grained Malware Classification using Coarse-grained Labels
Research areas
Tags
About the Author
Amazon Research Awards team

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Applied Scientist II, Machine Learning Accelerator - Annapurna Labs
US, TX, Austin
Our team is involved with pre-silicon design verification for custom IP. A critical requirement of the verification flow is the requirement of legal and realistic stimulus of a custom Machine Learning Accelerator Chip. Content creation is built using formal methods that model legal behavior of the design and then solving the problem to create the specific assembly tests. The entire frame work for creating these custom tests is developed using a SMT solver and custom software code to guide the solution space into templated scenarios. This highly visible and innovative role requires the design of this solving framework and collaborating with design verification engineers, hardware architects and designers to ensure that interesting content can be created for the projects needs. Key job responsibilities Develop an understanding for a custom machine learning instruction set architecture. Model correctness of instruction streams using first order logic. Create custom API's to allow control over scheduling and randomness. Deploy algorithms to ensure concurrent code is safely constructed. Create coverage metrics to ensure solution space coverage. Use novel methods like machine learning to automate content creation.
Applied Scientist, Personalization, Personalization
IL, Tel Aviv
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to help build Amazon’s next-generation customer memory and personalization systems. Are you interested in building systems that move beyond reacting to customer behavior, to actually understanding and remembering it over time? Our team is building Amazon’s customer memory layer – a system that extracts, curates, and reasons over customer knowledge to power next-generation personalization. This includes transforming noisy, unstructured signals into durable, high-quality representations of customer preferences, intents, and life events, and using them in real time to improve customer experiences. We are part of Amazon’s Personalization organization, a high-performing group that leverages large-scale machine learning, generative AI, and distributed systems to deliver highly relevant customer experiences. We tackle challenging problems at the intersection of information extraction, knowledge representation, LLM reasoning, and recommendation systems. Our systems operate under real-world constraints of scale, latency, and quality, requiring careful tradeoffs between precision, recall, and responsiveness. This team plays a central role in defining how Amazon understands its customers, and how that understanding is applied across the shopping experience. As an Applied Scientist, you will design and build ML and LLM-powered solutions for Amazon's customer memory and personalization systems. You will work on how customer knowledge is extracted, validated, and applied in production systems. You will own the end-to-end delivery of ML solutions, from problem formulation and modeling to offline and online experimentation, and production deployment at scale. You will deliver high-quality, scalable systems that power customer-facing experiences. You will drive work across areas such as fact extraction, memory quality and lifecycle, temporal reasoning, and grounded personalization, while navigating tradeoffs between quality, latency, and coverage. You will collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to translate research into measurable customer impact. Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information.
Applied Scientist, Ads Measurement Science
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of advertiser's ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We also own the science solutions for AI tools that unlock new insights and automate high-effort customer workflows, such as custom query and report generation based on natural language user requests. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. As an Applied Scientist on the team, you will lead measurement solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. Key job responsibilities Leverage deep expertise in one or more scientific disciplines to invent solutions to ambiguous ads measurement problems Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents Implement a significant portion of critical-path code, and partner with engineers to directly carry solutions into production Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Applied Scientist, Air Science & Tech
US, WA, Bellevue
The Amazon Middle Mile Science team is seeking an Applied Scientist to be part of a team solving complex airline operations problems to reduce cost and improve performance. You will work closely with product, research science and technical leaders throughout Amazon Air, Amazon Delivery Technology and and will be responsible for influencing funding decisions in areas of investment that you identify as critical future product offerings. You will partner with software developers and data scientists to build end-to-end data pipelines and production code, and you will have exposure to senior leadership as we communicate results and provide scientific guidance to the business. You will analyze large amounts of business data, build the or models that will enable us to continually delight our customers worldwide. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Science work, business analytics and have the aptitude to incorporate new approaches and methodologies while dealing with ambiguities. Excellent business and communication skills are a must to develop and define key business questions and build models that answer those questions. You should have a demonstrated ability to think strategically and analytically about business, product, and technical challenges. Further, you must have the ability to build and communicate compelling value propositions, and work across the organization to achieve consensus. This role requires a strong passion for customers, a high level of comfort navigating ambiguity, and a keen sense of ownership and drive to deliver results. Key job responsibilities - Partnership with the engineering and operations to drive modeling and design for complex business problems. - Drive full life-cycle projects. - Design and prototype decision support tools (product) to automate standardized processes and optimize trade-offs across the full decision space. - Execute complex modeling analyses to aid management in making key business decisions and set new policies.
Economist, Ads Measurement Science
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of their ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. We are hiring an Economist on the team to develop the next generation of incrementality measurement products, capturing the effect of advertising in driving sales as well as the effects of measurement tools on advertiser engagement with Amazon. As an Economist on the team, you will lead the design, implementation, and validation of large-scale causal inference methodologies to capture these properties. You will communicate your results with science and business leaders, and partner with other scientists and engineers to carry solutions into production. Key job responsibilities Leverage deep expertise in causal inference to develop robust, causally grounded ads measurement solutions Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences and leaders Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process
Fabrication R&D Scientist, Amazon Center for Quantum Computing
US, CA, Pasadena
The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, CA, is looking to hire a Fabrication R&D Scientist with experience in semiconductor process development who will aid in Amazon’s effort to bring cloud quantum computing services to its worldwide customer base. You will join a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, and hardware and software engineers working at the forefront of quantum computing. Through your work inside and outside of the cleanroom environment in the fabrication research and development group, you will solve problems related to developing next-generation quantum processors. Candidates must have a demonstrated background in sound scientific and engineering principles, and must have excellent data analysis, bias for action, problem solving, and communication skills, and be highly motivated and curious to research and learn new technical topics as needed. As a Fab R&D scientist you will be expected to work on new ideas and stay abreast of novel approaches in fabricating and packaging superconducting quantum processors. Working effectively within a team environment is critical. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Work/Life Balance Our team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Export Control Requirement Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be either a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum, or be able to obtain a US export license. If you are unsure if you meet these requirements, please apply and Amazon will review your application for eligibility. Key job responsibilities Responsibilities include developing and optimizing processes to fabricate high-coherence superconducting qubits; developing advanced 3DI interconnect and routing technologies for integrating superconducting quantum technologies; analyzing inline metrology and electrical test data; developing and maintaining integration documentation, design rules, and standard operating procedures; interacting with project leads to provide feedback that continuously improves different processes; staying updated with the latest advancements and industry trends in process integration and apply knowledge to improve processes and drive innovation providing technical guidance and support to junior colleagues, fostering a collaborative and knowledge-sharing work environment. A day in the life The candidate will develop novel technologies using micro-/nano-fabrication techniques inside the cleanroom (independently or in collaboration with other scientists, engineers, and technicians) for next-generation quantum computing. Outside the cleanroom, the candidate will plan experiments, analyze data, and conceive future innovations.
Applied Scientist, End User Messaging, AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we're advancing the frontier of trust and safety systems for cloud-based communication services. Our vision is to be the trusted foundation for transforming every business with Amazon AI teammates. Our mission is to deliver turnkey, enterprise-grade foundational AI capabilities that create delightful AI powered solutions. We're building sophisticated AI systems that protect infrastructure from evolving threats while enabling legitimate high-volume users to operate without friction, with messaging services at scale as a key application area. Key job responsibilities - Develop advanced machine learning approaches and agentic systems that autonomously adapt to evolving threat patterns across cloud communication services - Create behavioral detection models that quickly identify malicious patterns after onboarding rather than creating friction during signup - Design intelligent resource allocation algorithms that optimize service delivery based on real-time feedback - Develop frameworks operating at scale across diverse usage patterns, analyzing hundreds of thousands of daily active customers - Research novel approaches combining AI agents with trust and safety systems to solve complex security problems - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate science components into production systems - Conduct rigorous experimentation and establish evaluation frameworks to measure solution performance A day in the life As an Applied Scientist, you'll develop fraud detection algorithms and AI-powered security systems while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. You'll investigate novel approaches to behavioral analysis, develop methods for real-time reputation assessment, and validate ideas through rigorous experimentation. You'll collaborate with other scientists and engineers to transform research insights into scalable solutions, work directly with enterprise customers to understand requirements, and help shape the future of cloud security technology. About the team Our team is a central science organization supporting multiple product teams across AWS Core Services. We tackle fundamental challenges in AI and machine learning that require novel approaches beyond off-the-shelf solutions. Working at the intersection of machine learning, large language models, and domain-specific applications, we develop practical techniques that advance the state-of-the-art while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. Our team builds deep domain expertise across geospatial intelligence, trust and safety systems, autonomous operations, and other critical areas, collaborating closely with engineering teams to transform research insights into scalable production solutions.
Member of Technical Staff, PM-T, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
We are seeking a Product Manager, Data Strategy & Physical AI to define and execute the long-term product vision for FAR's AI-powered robotics platform. The intersection of foundation models and physical intelligence is creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how intelligent systems perceive, reason, and act in the real world. We need a visionary product leader who can treat data as our primary competitive moat and translate research frontiers into scalable, production-grade capabilities. In this role, you will champion our core data strategy for foundation model creation, building a partner and tool ecosystem to systematically acquire, label, and iteratively improve physical AI datasets. You will architect a continuous data collection flywheel across deployed robot fleets, transforming real-world kinematics, video, and force-torque telemetry from edge operations back into high-fidelity training tokens. Recognizing the limitations of real-world environments, you will also lead the strategy to create high-fidelity synthesized datasets, utilizing advanced physics engines and simulation to generate diverse training tokens at massive scale. Key job responsibilities Data Acquisition & Labeling Ecosystem: Establish the partnerships, tools, and vendor pipelines necessary to acquire, curate, and continuously label multi-modal datasets for training large-scale models. Fleet Data Flywheel Infrastructure: Architect the framework for a continuous data flywheel that securely streams high-frequency kinematics, egocentric video, and force-torque telemetry from real-world robot fleets back into the training loop. Synthetic Data & Simulation Strategy: Define the strategy for generating high-fidelity, physics-aligned synthesized datasets using advanced simulation environments to scale training tokens for edge-case scenarios and long-horizon tasks. Data Compliance & Governance: Partner with operations, privacy, legal, and security teams to build enterprise-grade data management pipelines that programmatically enforce data minimization, anonymization, and CCPA/GDPR compliance. Data Quality & Token Curation: Implement automated telemetry filtering and dataset pruning strategies to identify high-value operational logs, eliminate redundant fleet data, and optimize training compute costs. Cross-Functional Physical AI Delivery: Act as the strategic bridge between machine learning research scientists, simulation developers, robotics engineers, and hardware teams to deliver data-ready platform features that improve physical reliability. About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics - we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence - from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
Applied Scientist II, Amazon Search
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Search is reinventing how customers find products through natural-language and semantic understanding. We are looking for an Applied Scientist II to push the science behind Natural Language Search that interprets complex, constraint-rich shopping queries, retrieves and ranks the most relevant products. You will build and ship large-scale relevance and ranking models that measurably reduce the rate at which customers see irrelevant results, working on problems that span query understanding, semantic matching, and contextual ranking at Amazon scale. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, and ship deep-learning ranking and semantic-matching models that improve search relevance and reduce how often customers see irrelevant results, across hard query types. - Build the training data and evaluation methods that make these models work: synthetic and historical labels, hard-negative mining, and targeted sampling at the cases where search fails. - Develop signals that match product attributes to what the customer actually asked for. - Run offline and online A/B experiments, analyze precision/recall tradeoffs, and iterate to launch. - Work with engineers and scientists across teams to take models from prototype to production at Amazon scale. A day in the life You work alongside scientists and engineers on some of the hardest open problems in search relevance, teaching models to understand what customers really mean when they ask for something specific and nuanced. A typical day blends model development and data curation with sharp experiment analysis: diagnosing where search breaks down for a query segment, designing the fix, and proving the gains through offline metrics and live A/B tests that reach real Amazon customers. The work spans the full range, from surgical fixes that resolve stubborn failure pattern to broad modeling changes that move relevance for millions of queries at once. You'll see your ideas go from whiteboard to production fast, present results regularly to wider team, and help shape the team's relevance roadmap worldwide. About the team We are the science team behind Amazon's semantic search relevance and ranking. We own the models that understand nuanced, multi-constraint shopping queries and show products customers actually want. We operate close to production, measure ourselves on real customer-impact metrics, and run a culture of fast, rigorous experimentation. Every model decision is grounded in data.
Applied Scientist II, Alexa International
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa International is looking for passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientists to help build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems, requiring strong deep learning and generative models knowledge. Senior applied scientists will drive cross-team scientific strategy, influence partner teams, and deliver solutions that have broad impact across Alexa's international products and services. Key job responsibilities As a Applied Scientist II with the Alexa International team, you will work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art with LLMs, particularly delivering industry-leading scientific research and applied AI for multi-lingual applications — a challenging area for the industry globally. Your work will directly impact our global customers in the form of products and services that support Alexa+. You will leverage Amazon's heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in text, speech, and vision domains. The ideal candidate possesses a solid understanding of machine learning, speech and/or natural language processing, modern LLM architectures, LLM evaluation & tooling, and a passion for pushing boundaries in this vast and quickly evolving field. They thrive in fast-paced environment, like to tackle complex challenges, excel at swiftly delivering impactful solutions while iterating based on user feedback, and are able to influence and align multiple teams around a shared scientific vision. A day in the life * Analyze, understand, and model customer behavior and the customer experience based on large-scale data. * Build novel online & offline evaluation metrics and methodologies for multimodal personal digital assistants. * Fine-tune/post-train LLMs using advanced and innovative techniques like SFT, DPO, Reinforcement Learning (RLHF and RLAIF) for supporting model performance specific to a customer’s location and language. * Quickly experiment and set up experimentation framework for agile model and data analysis or A/B testing. * Contribute through industry-first research to drive innovation forward. * Drive cross-team scientific strategy and influence partner teams on LLM evaluation frameworks, post-training methodologies, and best practices for international speech and language systems. * Lead end-to-end delivery of scientifically complex solutions from research to production, including reusable science components and services that resolve architecture deficiencies across teams. * Serve as a scientific thought leader, communicating solutions clearly to partners, stakeholders, and senior leadership. * Actively mentor junior scientists and contribute to the broader internal and external scientific community through publications and community engagement.
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social