Sr. Applied Scientist, Special Projects

Amazon • New York, NY

23h • Onsite

About The Position

This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that focuses on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of customers. The team encourages innovation at scale to address big challenges, with no industries or subject areas out of bounds. Amazon emphasizes an inclusive culture, supported by thirteen employee-led affinity groups and programs for continuous learning. The team values work-life balance, mentorship, and career growth, striving to provide challenging projects and training for professional development.

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience delivering results for large, cross-functional initiatives/projects, or experience in solving complex business challenges by delivering accurate and timely financial models, analysis, and recommendations that have a proven impact on business (e.g., financial savings, operational improvements, or customer benefits)
• Experience with Machine Learning and Large Language Model fundamentals, including architecture, training/inference lifecycles, and optimization of model execution, or experience in development in the last 3 years
• Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations

Nice To Haves

• Experience using Unix/Linux
• Experience in professional software development
• Have publications on top-tier conferences, such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV or NeurIPS
• Experience providing technical leadership on high-impact cross-fucntional technical project
• Experience with autonomous AI frameworks (e.g. Dreamer, PlaNet, JEPA, NVIDIA Cosmos)
• Knowledge of decentralized optimization methods (e.g. swarm intelligence)
• Familiarity with advanced optimization and control methods (multi-objective optimization, constrained optimization, discrete optimization, model-based optimization, stochastic optimization, distributed control).
• Experience developing and maintaining digital twins
• Experience with multiscale geospatial modeling and forecasting
• Track record of translating research into production systems at scale

Responsibilities

• Lead and execute complex, ambiguous research projects from ideation to production deployment
• Drive technical strategy and roadmap decisions for ML/AI initiatives
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and business teams to translate research into scalable products
• Publish research findings at top-tier conferences and contribute to the broader scientific community
• Establish best practices for ML experimentation, evaluation, and deployment

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