Applied Scientist

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 Privacy 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 in a team of exceptional scientists to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computer Vision (CV) related tasks. They will work in a hybrid, fast-paced organization where scientists, engineers, and product managers work together to build customer facing experiences. They will collaborate with and mentor other scientists to raise the bar of scientific research in Amazon. Their 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 candidate with strong technical experiences and a passion for building scientific driven solutions in a fast-paced environment. This Senior Applied Scientist 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. They should leverage 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, they must possess exceptional communication skills and understand how to influence key stakeholders.

This Applied Scientist 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
This Applied Scientist will lead the science solution design, run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing customer experience. They will set examples for the team on good science practice and standards. Besides theoretical analysis and innovation, they will work closely with talented engineers and ML scientists to put algorithms and models into practice.

This Applied Scientist's work will also directly impact the trust customers place in Alexa, globally. They will 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 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

- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with SQL and an RDBMS (e.g., Oracle) or Data Warehouse

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience implementing algorithms using both toolkits and self-developed code
- Have publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals

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Experience Level

Senior Level