Senior Applied Scientist, Real-Time Conversational AI , AGI

We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to help drive the research and development of real-time multimodal conversational AI. You will contribute across two focus areas: advancing foundation models Basic qualifications: - 5+ 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 - Hands-on experience training large-scale foundation models — direct involvement in model training, not just using pre-trained models - Experience with multimodal model architectures that jointly process or generate across speech, text, and audio modalities - Strong understanding of transformer architectures and their application to speech/audio domains - Publication record at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, or equivalent) - Demonstrated ownership of a research area — driving technical direction for a workstream and collaborating effectively across scientists and engineers Preferred: - Hands-on experience building real-time AI systems — speech, audio, or video - Track record with post-training methods: reinforcement learning, reward modeling, RLHF/RLAIF, or alignment techniques applied to generative models - Experience with real-time interactive systems — models that handle concurrent input and output - Experience building speech-to-speech or audio-to-audio generative models (codec models, autoregressive audio generation) - Hands-on design of reward models or reward functions specifically for speech/audio quality, naturalness, or conversational behavior - Experience with distributed training at scale — including parallelism strategies, training stability, and curriculum design - Familiarity with hardware-informed model design — understanding how architecture choices affect inference latency, memory, and cost - Background in speech recognition, speech synthesis (TTS), or speech enhancement - Experience shipping research to production at scale — models serving real users, not just benchmark results - Contributions to open-source speech/audio ML systems or widely used research codebases - Experience mentoring junior scientists and engineers 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