Applied Scientist, Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI)

Alexa is the voice activated digital assistant powering devices like Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, and Fire TV, which are at the forefront of this latest technology wave. To preserve our customers’ experience and trust, the Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI) team creates policies and builds services and tools through Machine Learning techniques to detect and mitigate sensitive content across Alexa. We are looking for an experienced Senior Applied Scientist to build industry-leading technologies in attribute extraction and sensitive content detection across all languages and countries.
An Applied Scientist will be a tech lead for a team of exceptional scientists to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in NLP or CV related tasks. You will work in a hybrid, fast-paced organization where scientists, engineers, and product managers work together to build customer facing experiences. You will collaborate with and mentor other scientists to raise the bar of scientific research in Amazon. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech, language, and computer vision technologies.

We are looking for a leader with strong technical experiences a passion for building scientific driven solutions in a fast-paced environment. You should have good understanding of NLP models (e.g. LSTM, transformer based models) or CV models (e.g. CNN, AlexNet, ResNet) and where to apply them in different business cases. You leverage your exceptional technical expertise, a sound understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science, and practical experience of building large-scale distributed systems to creating reliable, scalable, and high-performance products. In addition to technical depth, you must possess exceptional communication skills and understand how to influence key stakeholders.

You will be joining a select group of people making history producing one of the most highly rated products in Amazon’s history, so if you are looking for a challenging and innovative role where you can solve important problems while growing as a leader, this may be the place for you.

Key job responsibilities
You’ll lead the science solution design, run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing customer experience. You set examples for the team on good science practice and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and innovation, you will work closely with talented engineers and ML scientists to put your algorithms and models into practice. Your work will directly impact the trust customers place in Alexa, globally. You contribute directly to our growth by hiring smart and motivated Scientists to establish teams that can deliver swiftly and predictably, adjusting in an agile fashion to deliver what our customers need.

A day in the life
You will be working with a group of talented scientists on researching algorithm and running experiments to test scientific proposal/solutions to improve our sensitive contents detection and mitigation. This will involve collaboration with partner teams including engineering, PMs, data annotators, and other scientists to discuss data quality, policy, and model development. You will mentor other scientists, review and guide their work, help develop roadmaps for the team. You work closely with partner teams across Alexa to deliver platform features that require cross-team leadership.
About the hiring group

About the team
The mission of the Alexa Sensitive Content Intelligence (ASCI) team is to (1) minimize negative surprises to customers caused by sensitive content, (2) detect and prevent potential brand-damaging interactions, and (3) build customer trust through appropriate interactions on sensitive topics.
The term “sensitive content” includes within its scope a wide range of categories of content such as offensive content (e.g., hate speech, racist speech), profanity, content that is suitable only for certain age groups, politically polarizing content, and religiously polarizing content. The term “content” refers to any material that is exposed to customers by Alexa (including both 1P and 3P experiences) and includes text, speech, audio, and video.

Basic Qualifications

– 3+ years of building models for business application experience
– PhD, or Master’s degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
– Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
– Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

Preferred Qualifications

– Experience using Unix/Linux
– Experience in professional software development

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.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $136,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $223,400/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.