About this role
Alexa Connections is on a mission to become the world's most trusted communication agent — spanning calls, text, email, and the ever-expanding surfaces where people connect. We're building intelligence that keeps customers connected effortlessly while putting their trust and privacy first. As an Applied Scientist, you'll help build the smartest communications agent for people — an agent that understands intent, context, and relationships, and that acts on a customer's behalf to make every interaction feel effortless and genuinely helpful Key job responsibilities You'll research, develop, and deploy the next generation of on-device AI for communication, bringing small language models, agentic capabilities, and generative intelligence to the edge so that customers get responsive, and private experiences without relying on the cloud. In practice, that means designing on-device arbitration systems that intelligently route between local and cloud inference in real time, applying modern compression techniques like quantization, distillation, and low-rank adaptation to fit frontier-class capabilities into tight memory and latency budgets, and optimizing inference across on-device accelerators such as NPUs and mobile GPUs. You'll build privacy-first personalization that learns and adapts without user data ever leaving the device, and contribute to the science of edge communication intelligence, intent understanding, contact ranking, proactive connectivity, and conversational reasoning, all running locally. Throughout, you'll collaborate closely with hardware, systems, and product teams to co-design models with the target device in mind, and translate research advances into production features that push the state of the art in on-device AI. About the team We're building up the Alexa Connections science team, so you'll join early and grow alongside it. You'll work closely with experienced scientists and engineers invested in your development, with plenty of mentorship, room to broaden your skills, and the chance to own meaningful problems as you grow. It's a supportive place to do impactful work early in your career, shaping how millions of customers connect every day.