Sr. Applied Scientist: Alexa Engine Amazon
Seattle, WA

Job Description

Do you want to change the world? Alexa and Echo are literally shaping the future of voice recognition and cloud-based content/services. Alexa is the name of the Amazon cloud service and the brain that powers Echo, the award-winning and groundbreaking new Amazon device designed around your voice. Echo connects to Alexa, to provide information, answer questions, play music, read the news, check sports scores or the weather, and more-instantly. It's hands-free, and always on. All you have to do is ask.

To achieve this, we blend of a variety of disciplines (such as NLP, data mining, machine learning, big data, semantic web, graph stores, cloud computing) in an effort to understand our customers and the things they're excited about. To complement our complex algorithms and extensive data analyses, we create elevated and inspirational mobile and web features across the entire Echo system. We use artificial intelligence, data mining and usability studies to develop new features, and we test them through hundreds of R & D experiments a year. We want to make it easy for you to search for your favorite products, discover new brands you'd like, play your favorite songs or even replenish your fridge - and much, much more!! We are also incredibly intent on solving some of the most complex computing problems to be found in industry and academia, and we get to test our solutions in the real world every day. And most importantly, we relentlessly ask: "What haven't we though of yet?"

As a member of the Alexa OS team, you will be responsible for leading the development and launch of core features. You will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define these features, drive the system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality product.

The ideal candidate has a demonstrable track record of technical leadership and success in delivering new features and products. A commitment to teamwork, hustle, and strong communication skills (to both business and technical partners) are absolute requirements. Creating reliable, scalable, and high performance products requires exceptional technical expertise and a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Machine Learning in the context of large-scale distributed systems. This person has thrived and succeeded in delivering high quality technology products/services in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift quickly.

As a Machine Learning Scientist, you will work with software developers to design and implement algorithms and predictive models for how customers use and interact with Alexa. You will help lay the foundation to move from directed interactions to learned behaviors that enable Alexa to understand customer needs and take action. And, you will have the satisfaction of working on a product your friends and family can relate to, and want to use every day. Like the world of smart phones less than 10 years ago, this is a rare opportunity to have a giant impact on the way people live.