Principal Applied Scientist, Amazon Stores Economics & Science (SEAS)

Amazon.com • Palo Alto, CA

209d • $179,000 - $309,400

About The Position

Stores Economics and Science (SEAS) is an interdisciplinary science and engineering team in Amazon's Stores organization with a peak-jumping mission: we apply expertise in science and engineering to move from local to global optima in methods, models, and software. We pursue this mission by leveraging frontier science; collaborating with partner teams; and learning from the tools, experience, and perspective of others. We scale by solving problems, first in the small to prove concepts, and then in the large by building scalable solutions. We also help other teams within Amazon scale by hiring and developing the best and embedding them in other business units. In 2024, we are focused on economics and science in areas related to (1) improving delivery speed and lowering cost-to-serve, (2) seller fees and incentives, and (3) emerging machine learning using LLMs. We also have some ongoing and highly leveraged collaborations that help partner teams inside Amazon short-circuit months of R&D or otherwise look around corners. We are looking for a seasoned Applied Science leader to build and deliver cutting-edge science and engineering solutions to improve our Stores business. In this role, you will lead a team of scientists and engineers with backgrounds in machine learning, NLP, IR, statistics, and economics to identify bottlenecks in our business, conceive new ideas to overcome those challenges, and deploy scientific solutions in partnership with product teams. Your responsibilities include developing the scientific models, benchmarks, and services. Graduate education and hands-on experience in machine learning, optimization, causal inference, Bayesian statistics, deep learning, or other quantitative scientific fields is a must. To be successful in this role, you should be a quick learner and comfortable with a high degree of ambiguity.

Requirements

• 10+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience.
• PhD, or Master's degree and 10+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language.
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of causal inference and forecasting models.
• Practical knowledge of leveraging Transformers, LLMs, or other deep learning techniques.
• Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of scientists and engineers to identify bottlenecks in the business.
• Conceive new ideas to overcome challenges in the Stores business.
• Deploy scientific solutions in partnership with product teams.
• Develop scientific models, benchmarks, and services.

Benefits

• Full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.
• Equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Industry: General Merchandise Retailers
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees