Amazon
Principal Applied Scientist, Mission AI Lab, AWS Region Services
$199K–$269K
Arlington, VA · Principal · Full-time · Posted Oct 20, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years required; 10+ years preferred.
- Education
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
About the job
Adapts frontier models for national security problems, developing training methods, evaluation systems, and production-ready capabilities with analysts and infrastructure engineers.
What you'll do
- Lead model adaptation from fine-tuning and post-training through reinforcement learning, delivering reliable production systems.
- Create evaluation sets, metrics, and data pipelines for tasks without established benchmarks.
- Guide research and technical direction, work with analysts and engineers, and mentor scientists.
What they ask for
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis.
- Experience translating informal customer requirements into problem definitions amid ambiguity and competing objectives.
- Programming experience in Java, C++, Python, or a related language; experience leading experienced scientists and developing junior members.
Nice to have
- 10+ years of relevant work in industry or academia; experience creating novel algorithms or advancing the state of the art.
- Current, active TS/SCI US Government Security Clearance; experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning or efficient training within a fixed compute budget.
Pay
198,900.00 - 269,000.00 USD annually (base salary)
Tools
Java, C++, Python, LoRA-style methods
AI focus
Adapt frontier models for complex reasoning and national security tasks through supervised fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop feedback.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative