Saleh Soltan is a Principal Applied Scientist in Amazon AGI. When joined Amazon (initially Alexa) in 2019, he led the efforts on pre-training and distilling multilingual encoder models for NLU and after that became an integral part of the Alexa Teacher Model program (the first large scale language model training initiative at Amazon). Since 2023, Saleh has been playing a key role in pre-training of LLMs for Alexa and AGI. Prior to joining Amazon, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University and obtained a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. He is the Gold Medalist of the 23rd National Mathematics Olympiad in Iran in 2005, the recipient of Columbia University Electrical Engineering Armstrong Memorial Award in 2012, and Columbia University Electrical Engineering Jury Award in 2018.