Sr. Language Engineer, Alexa Shopping

Interested in Alexa? Come work on it. We’re building the speech and language solutions behind Amazon Echo and other Amazon products and services. We’re working hard, having fun, and making history; come join us!

Amazon is looking for a Senior Language Engineer to join the Spoken Language Understanding team for Alexa Shopping. We are seeking a candidate with strong analytical skills and language technology experience to help us measure, analyze and solve complex problems. In this role, you will design and develop new language understanding capabilities for Alexa, and help make her smarter every day.

Specifically, the Language Engineer will:

• Innovate new Natural Language Understanding solutions at Amazon using state-of-the-art approaches
• Provide leadership and mentoring in the Alexa Shopping Language Engineering team
• Design the language understanding systems for new Alexa features and overall Alexa architecture
• Write recognition grammars that enable Alexa to understand a wide variety of natural speech.
• Train high performing machine learning models for language understanding
• Test and deploy changes to Alexa's language understanding codebase
• Write scripts to analyze language patterns and process text data.
• Measure the accuracy of Alexa's language understanding
• Implement bug fixes and accuracy improvements

Basic Qualifications

• Master's or higher degree in a field like linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years experience in quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, or natural language processing
• Experience programming in Perl, Python, or another scripting language

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in a field like linguistics, computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP)
• 8+ years of experience working in NLP
• Experience in writing grammars and building FSTs
• Experience with database queries and data analysis processes (SQL, R, Matlab, etc.), and Unix
• Experience with machine learning or statistical language modeling
• Experience with Deep Learning and Large Language Models
• Practical knowledge of version control and agile development
• Excellent communication, strong organizational skills and very detail oriented
• Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
• Willingness to support several projects at one time, and to accept reprioritization as necessary
• Experience providing thought leadership and mentoring to a team
• Fluency in multiple languages
• Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup

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. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.


Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $74,700/year in our lowest geographic market up to $185,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.