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Applied Scientist, Alexa Connections

  • Vancouver, BC, Canada

Full-time

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Job details

Job type
Full-time
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Posting language
English
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Original job description

Description

Alexa Connections is on a mission to become the world's most trusted communication agent, spanning calls, text, email, and the ever-expanding surfaces where people connect. We're building intelligence that keeps customers connected effortlessly while putting their trust and privacy first. As an Applied Scientist, you'll help build the smartest communications agent for people, an agent that understands intent, context, and relationships, and that acts on a customer's behalf to make every interaction feel effortless and genuinely helpful

Key job responsibilities

You'll research, develop, and deploy the language intelligence that powers how people communicate, using and adapting large language models to understand intent, context, and the entities that matter in a conversation, the people, contacts, events, dates, and topics that tell the agent who and what a message is about. In practice, that means reframing classic NLP and named entity recognition as LLM-native tasks through instruction-tuning, in-context learning, and structured generation, and building agentic capabilities that reason over multi-turn conversations and act on them, from summarization and smart replies to coreference and context resolution grounded in a customer's relationships and history. You'll fine-tune, align, and optimize foundation models for the messiness of real communication data, informal text, code-switching, misspellings, transcribed speech, and multilingual content, and ground their outputs in customer context using retrieval-augmented generation and personalization so responses stay relevant and reliable. Throughout, you'll take models from research to production at scale, partnering with engineering and product teams to ship LLM-powered features used by millions every day, and define the evaluation frameworks that measure quality, faithfulness, latency, and customer impact while keeping trust and privacy first.

Basic Qualifications

  • PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience
  • 2+ years of programming in Java, C++, Python or related language experience
  • Experience building and deploying NLP models in production, such as named entity recognition, entity linking, intent detection, or language understanding

Preferred Qualifications

  • PhD in computer science, machine learning, engineering, or related fields
  • Knowledge of standard speech and machine learning techniques
  • Experience in building speech recognition, machine translation and natural language processing systems (e.g., commercial speech products or government speech projects)
  • Experience applying large language models to NLP tasks, including instruction-tuning, in-context learning, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
  • Experience with conversational AI, dialogue systems, or communication/messaging applications
  • Experience with multilingual NLP, coreference resolution, summarization, or working with noisy real-world text (transcribed speech, informal messaging

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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. As a total compensation company, Amazon's package may include other elements such as sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, basic life & AD&D insurance), Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP), Deferred Profit Sharing Plan (DPSP), paid time off, and other resources to improve health and well-being. We thank all applicants for their interest, however only those interviewed will be advised as to hiring status.

CAN, BC, Vancouver - 149,300.00 - 249,300.00 CAD annually

CAN, ON, Toronto - 149,300.00 - 249,300.00 CAD annually
More about this job

Responsibilities

Research, develop, and deploy language intelligence and LLM-powered communication features, including intent and entity understanding, conversation reasoning, summarization, and smart replies. Fine-tune and ground models in customer context, take them from research to production, and establish evaluation frameworks for quality, faithfulness, latency, and customer impact while prioritizing trust and privacy.

Requirements

Requires a PhD or a master's degree plus at least four years of experience building machine-learning models or algorithms for business applications, along with at least two years of programming experience in Java, C++, Python, or a related language. Candidates must have production experience building and deploying NLP models; preferred qualifications include a relevant PhD, speech and machine-learning expertise, LLM application experience, conversational AI, multilingual NLP, and work with noisy real-world text.

Skills

  • Applied Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Large Language Models
  • Named Entity Recognition
  • Entity Linking
  • Intent Detection
  • Instruction Tuning
  • In-Context Learning
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  • Conversational AI
  • Dialogue Systems
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Coreference Resolution
  • Summarization
  • Python
  • Model Deployment

Benefits

  • Health Insurance
  • Dental Insurance
  • Vision Insurance
  • Prescription Coverage
  • Basic Life and AD&D Insurance
  • Deferred Profit Sharing Plan
  • Paid Time Off
  • Sign-On Payments
  • Restricted Stock Units

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Categories

  • Science & Research
  • Technology
  • Data & Analytics
  • Software

Keywords

  • Applied Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Large Language Models
  • Named Entity Recognition
  • Entity Linking
  • Intent Detection
  • Language Understanding
  • Instruction Tuning
  • In-Context Learning
  • Structured Generation
  • Agentic Capabilities
  • Multi-Turn Conversations
  • Coreference Resolution
  • Context Resolution
  • Model Fine-Tuning
  • Model Alignment
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  • Personalization
  • Speech Recognition
  • Machine Translation
  • Multilingual NLP
  • Summarization
  • Noisy Text
  • Python
  • Java
  • C++
  • Model Evaluation
  • Production Deployment
  • Privacy

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