Sr. Applied Scientist, Alexa Enterprise

Are you excited about building at the intersection of enterprise AI and customer experience? Are you passionate about applying science to real customer problems? Do you want your work shaped by real-world conditions and validated through customer deployments? The Alexa Enterprise team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong background in speech and audio machine learning who thrives in a startup-style environment. In this role, you'll set scientific direction and lead the development of techniques to improve speech-to-text accuracy for domain-specific use cases and optimize the performance and latency of end-to-end audio pipelines. You'll lead work across model evaluation and selection, fine-tuning, data and evaluation strategies, and real-time inference optimization. You'll partner closely with software engineers to turn scientific advances into production capabilities, while working with enterprise customers to understand how speech and audio systems perform in their environments. You'll turn improvements inspired by one customer's needs into capabilities that serve many, while influencing teams around a shared scientific vision. We're a small, fast-moving team building AI-powered solutions at the intersection of Alexa AI capabilities and AWS cloud services. Our customers span healthcare, energy, retail, and insurance, and they're deploying in environments where the technical challenges are real and the feedback loops are immediate. Key job responsibilities - Set the scientific direction for improving speech-to-text accuracy across domain-specific use cases and real-world operating conditions - Lead the evaluation, selection, adaptation, and fine-tuning of speech and audio models based on accuracy, latency, cost, reliability, and deployment constraints - Drive improvements to the performance and latency of end-to-end audio pipelines, from signal processing and streaming through inference and transcription - Define datasets, benchmarks, experiments, and evaluation methodologies that reflect customer use cases - Lead the optimization of models and inference pipelines for reliable, real-time operation - Work directly with enterprise customers to understand quality challenges, validate scientific improvements, and identify opportunities for broader platform capabilities - Turn patterns from customer engagements into reusable models, evaluation methods, and scientific capabilities that scale across customers and industries - Influence and collaborate with software engineering and partner teams to productionize models, measure their performance, and continuously improve deployed systems - Write scientific and technical documents, lead reviews, and communicate experimental results and trade-offs to engineering, product, and business leaders - Mentor Applied Scientists and engineers, participate in hiring, and raise the team's science and engineering standards About the team The Alexa Enterprise team builds AI-powered solutions for businesses. We work with enterprise customers across healthcare, energy, retail, and insurance to deploy solutions that transform operations. Our team operates at the intersection of Alexa AI capabilities and AWS cloud services, partnering closely with AWS sales, product, and specialist teams to deliver customer outcomes. Our work brings together applied AI, speech and audio science, real-time systems, and cloud services. Senior Applied Scientists on the team have real ownership, from identifying and framing customer problems through setting scientific direction, experimentation, production integration, and measurement of customer impact. This is an opportunity to lead meaningful scientific work while helping shape a platform in its early stages. Minimum qualifications - 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience - PhD, or Master's 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 Preferred qualifications - PhD or equivalent research experience, or a PhD and experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals - Experience leading a science team - Experience applying machine learning to speech or audio processing, including generative models, speech enhancement, source separation, or related applications - Familiarity with voice-processing techniques such as beamforming, acoustic echo cancellation, and noise reduction Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. 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 https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner. The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits . USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 192,200.00 - 260,000.00 USD annually USA, WA, Seattle - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually