Sr. Applied Scientist, Amazon Music - Catalog

Amazon • Seattle, WA

1d • $167,100 - $226,100 • Onsite

About The Position

Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale. The Amazon Music – Catalog Team develops sophisticated models for understanding music across multiple dimensions: sonic, thematic, cultural, lyrical, etc. This team aims to unify this deep music knowledge that will power intelligent music experiences across Amazon Music. Ultimately, the goal of our team is to delivery a musically credible experience, which will help grow engagement across all customers, but also delight the fans!

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• 5+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Domain expertise in either Recommender Systems, Search or Ranking

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Catalog Metadata, behavioral segmentation at scale
• Experience with real-time ML systems (online scoring, streaming data, anomaly detection)
• Experience working with large-scale customer data platforms or data lake architectures
• Strong publication track record in top AI/ML Conferences (e.g. Recsys, KDD, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, etc.)

Responsibilities

• Help shape the scientific direction of the organization by proposing state of the art modeling approaches, driving experimentation, and balancing scientific rigor with execution speed to deliver measurable customer impact.
• Think strategically about the future of GenAI and multimodal AI, identifying opportunities to transform music understanding, curation, and engagement.
• Stay at the forefront of advancements in GenAI, recommendation systems, and large-scale machine learning, driving adoption of new techniques where they create meaningful customer value.
• Collaborate closely with engineers across Music Intelligence, Personalization, Search and other partner teams to support long-term product and CX goals.
• Mentor applied scientists and engineers while actively contributing to the broader science and ML community across Amazon Music.
• Produce clear and concise technical documentation outlining methodologies, design decisions, trade-offs, experiment results, and customer impact.
• Invent and scale innovative AI/ML solutions for complex music intelligence, personalization, metadata quality, and content understanding problems.
• Drive the design of scientifically sophisticated ML systems and platforms, contributing core technical innovation and providing organization-wide architectural guidance.
• Define the long-term science vision and roadmap for Amazon Music AI initiatives, translating customer needs into actionable plans for science and engineering teams.
• Partner closely with engineering and product teams to build and launch scalable AI solutions that improve music discovery, personalization, and customer experience.
• Lead rigorous experimentation and data-driven evaluation, including large-scale A/B testing, to measure and optimize customer impact.
• Communicate complex scientific concepts clearly to technical and business stakeholders, including senior leadership.
• Mentor scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, technical excellence, and strong customer focus.

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior