Principal Applied Scientist, PXT

About the Role
In this role, you will own the science strategy and technical vision for this intelligence layer, leading a team of applied scientists working across GenAI and predictive modeling. You will shape how heterogeneous signals — text, behavioral, network, temporal — come together to power talent applications at Amazon scale, from workforce forecasting to personalized development to compensation strategy. You will identify opportunities where science investment can have material impact on long-term objectives or annual goals and build consensus around needed investments, working comfortably across different modeling paradigms and data modalities to guide principal and senior scientists in their most challenging and strategic decisions while serving as the strategic science advisor to PXT leaders operating at the Director, VP, and SVP levels. As a hands-on leader, you will personally own development and delivery of the most complex science problems at the intersection of multiple ML disciplines, stay current with emergent AI/ML science and engineering trends to influence focus areas in a rapidly evolving landscape, and participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship, and leadership development.


Key job responsibilities
• Lead technical initiatives in people science models, driving breakthrough approaches through hands-on research and development in areas like foundation models for predictive modeling, efficient multi-modal LLMs, and zero-shot learning
• Design and implement novel ML architectures that push the boundaries of how workforce signals are represented, fused, and predicted at scale
• Guide technical direction for research initiatives across the team, ensuring robust performance in production environments serving hundreds of thousands of employees
• Mentor and develop senior scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions on the most complex cross-domain problems
• Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world talent applications
• Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies across teams, shaping the long-term platform architecture


About the team
The People eXperience and Technology (PXT) Core Science Team uses science, engineering, and customer-obsessed problem solving to proactively identify mechanisms, process improvements, and products that simultaneously improve Amazon and Amazonians' lives, wellbeing, and value of work. As an interdisciplinary team combining talents from machine learning, statistics, economics, behavioral science, engineering, and product development, the Core Science team develops and delivers measurable solutions through innovation and rapid prototyping to accelerate informed, accurate, and reliable decision-making backed by science and data.