Applied Scientist , Customer Engagement Technology - Amazon

Job ID: 2868355 | Amazon.com Services LLC

Amazon.com is broadly recognized as a leader in providing exceptional Customer Service globally. At Amazon, we are driven by innovation and customer obsession, which is deeply ingrained in everything we do, especially in the Customer Engagement Technology (CET) department. Leveraging conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology, we strive to predict and resolve customer issues through self-service and automation solutions.

The CET team leads AI and Large Language Models (LLM)-driven customer experience transformation using task-oriented dialogue systems. We develop multi-modal, multi-turn, goal-oriented dialog systems that can handle customer issues at Amazon scale across multiple languages. These systems are designed to adapt to changing company policies and invoke correct Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to automate solutions to customer problems.

Key focus areas include:

1. Task-Oriented Dialog Systems: Building reliable, scalable, and adaptive LLM-based agents for understanding intents, determining eligibilities, making API calls, confirming outcomes, and exploring alternatives across hundreds of customer service intents, while adapting to changing policies.
2. Lifelong Learning: Researching continuous learning approaches for injecting new domain knowledge while retaining the model's foundational abilities and preventing catastrophic forgetting.
3. Agentic Systems: Developing a modular agentic framework to handle multi-domain conversations through appropriate system abstractions.
4. Complex Multi-turn Instruction Following: Identifying approaches to guarantee compliance with instructions that specify standard operating procedures for handling multi-turn complex scenarios.
5. Inference-Time Adaptability: Researching inference-time scaling methods and improving in-context learning abilities of custom models to enable real-time adaptability to new features, actions, or bug fixes without solely relying on retraining.
6. Context Adherence: Exploring methods to ground responses in specific customer attributes, account information, and behavioral data to prevent hallucinations and ensure high-fidelity responses.
7. Policy Grounding: Investigating techniques to align bot behavior with evolving company policies by grounding on complex, unstructured policy documents, ensuring consistent and compliant actions.
8. End-to-End Dialog Policy Optimization: Researching alignment approaches to optimize successful dialog completions.
9. Scalable Evaluations: Developing automated approaches to evaluate the quality of experience, and correctness of agentic resolutions.

Key job responsibilities:

1. Research and development of LLM-based chatbots and conversational AI systems for customer service applications.
2. Design and implement state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ML models for tasks such as language understanding, dialogue management, and response generation.
3. Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data scientists, software engineers, and product managers, to integrate LLM-based solutions into Amazon's customer service platforms.
4. Develop and implement strategies for data collection, annotation, and model training to ensure high-quality and robust performance of the chatbots.
5. Conduct experiments and evaluations to measure the performance of the developed models and systems, and identify areas for improvement.
6. Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in NLP, LLMs, and conversational AI, and explore opportunities to incorporate new techniques and technologies into Amazon's customer service solutions.
7. Collaborate with internal and external research communities, participate in conferences, and contribute to publications to advance the field.

A day in the life:

We thrive on solving challenging problems to innovate for our customers. By pushing the boundaries of technology, we create unparalleled experiences that enable us to rapidly adapt to a dynamic environment. Our decisions are guided by data, and we collaborate with engineering, science, and product teams to foster an innovative and learning environment.

If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply!

Benefits Summary:

Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include:

1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage
2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options
3. Paid Time Off (PTO)
4. 401(k) Plan

About the team:

Join our team of scientists and engineers who develop and deploy LLM-based Conversational AI systems to enhance Amazon's customer service experience and effectiveness. We work on innovative solutions that help customers solve their issues and get their questions answered efficiently, and on associate-facing products that support our customer service associate workforce.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- Master's degree
- 2+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- PhD
- 3+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.