Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science

Amazon is hiring an Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science in Seattle, United States. It pays $143k-$193k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this applied scientist role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, AI research and generative AI.
Level classifies it as a senior role.
Level lists 20,000+ other open roles at Amazon.

AI in this role

Pioneer advanced GenAI and multimodal solutions to power next-generation agentic shopping experiences and catalog understanding.

Python

ai-researchgenerative-aimachine-learningcomputer-visioninformation-retrievalalgorithm-design

At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product relevant information at unprecedented scale with Frontier Models and Agents. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity ranging from electronics to groceries to digital content.

The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Enriching product information requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data, all while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily.

Amazon's Catalog System Services Science team is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers.

Key job responsibilities
- Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval. In essence, translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks
- Design and implement leading models leveraging frontier models, and agentic architectures to enrich catalog information at billion-product scale
- Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions
- Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment, processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks
- Represent the team in the broader science community - publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research

Basic qualifications

- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- 2+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience
- Prior experience in the domains of LLMs, or large-scale deep learning systems

Preferred qualifications

- Publications in top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, COLING, KDD, SIGMOD, WWW, AAAI, or similar
- Experience with multimodal LLMs, including hands-on post training techniques

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, WA, Seattle - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science at Amazon rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $143k-$193k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on September 23, 2026.
Seniority: senior.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchGenerative AIMachine learningComputer visionInformation RetrievalAlgorithm DesignPython

Also common in applied scientist jobs at this level

NLP Reinforcement learning TensorFlow Spark AWS Computer vision

Pay

This job starts at: $143k
Typical applied scientist job: $167k

This posting starts 15% below the typical applied scientist job. See applied scientist jobs

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
Tell me about a project where generative ai was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through a computer vision problem you solved, from raw data to a deployed model.
Tell me about a project where information retrieval was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Generative AI, Machine learning, Computer vision, and Information Retrieval. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

Get your CV reviewed before you apply

Send your CV and the role you want next. Your review arrives by email within 3 days.

Get a free CV review Check your resume with the ATS resume checker