Applied Science Manager

We're looking for a seasoned Applied Science Manager to establish and lead a brand-new team in Bangalore, India, within Alexa Edge AI. This is a rare greenfield opportunity to shape the future of ambient intelligence by pioneering breakthroughs in computer vision, acoustic modelling, and multimodal semantic understanding that will power hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices worldwide.
As an applied science manager, you will architect and scale a world-class applied science team that pushes the boundaries of what's possible at the intersection of edge and cloud AI. From enabling seamless visual ID that recognises who's in the room to crafting ultra-low-latency wake-word detection that works flawlessly in noisy environments to building multimodal models that build deep semantic understanding, your work will directly define how Alexa perceives, understands, and interacts with the physical world.
Responsibilities:
Establish and grow a high-calibre applied science team from the ground up at our new Bangalore site, defining the team's charter, culture, hiring bar, and technical roadmap.
Recruit, mentor, and develop top-tier scientists and engineers across computer vision, speech/acoustics, and multimodal ML disciplines.
Foster a culture of scientific rigour, rapid experimentation, customer obsession, and operational excellence.
Drive R& D of privacy-preserving edge solutions like visual recognition and acoustic modelling (wake word and audio intelligence) optimised for edge deployment on resource-constrained hardware (custom silicon, DSPs, and NPUs).
Define and execute strategies for optimising latency, privacy, accuracy, and cost.
collaborating with hardware and silicon teams to co-design next-generation AI accelerators and model architectures.
Own the end-to-end lifecycle from research ideation through experimentation, prototyping, and production deployment at scale.
Establish robust benchmarking, A/B testing, and metrics frameworks to measure real-world impact.
Partner closely with engineering, product, and UX teams to translate scientific breakthroughs into delightful customer experiences.
Shape the long-term science and technology roadmap for Alexa's perceptual AI capabilities.
Represent the team in org-wide science reviews, patent filings, and publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICASSP, etc. ).
Build strong cross-site collaboration with teams in Sunnyvale, Boston and other global locations.
Requirements:
PhD or Master's degree and 8+ years of applied research experience.
3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience.
Experience managing and deploying ML products.
Deep expertise in at least one of the following: computer vision, acoustic/speech modelling, or multimodal learning.
Preferred qualifications:
Experience in building and developing a high-performance team.
Experience with multimodal LLMs for visual or speech understanding.
Experience with on-device/edge ML deployment and optimisation.
Publication track record at top-tier ML/CV/Speech conferences.

Experience
9-13 yrs