Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products Bidding

Amazon is hiring an Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products Bidding in Seattle, United States. It pays $172k-$223k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this applied scientist role: the job is building AI systems.
Pay on this posting starts in line with the typical applied scientist posting on Level.
The posting mentions Python, Machine learning and Deep learning among its tools and skills.
Amazon has 22,000+ other open roles on Level.
This posting went up in the last few days.

AI in this role

Lead AI/ML initiatives and develop models to optimize sponsored products bidding and advertising auctions.

pythonmachine-learningdeep-learning

applied-sciencemodelinga-b-testingalgorithm-development

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The SP team's primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!

Within Sponsored Products, the Bidding team is responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products around bid controls (dynamic bidding, bid recommendations, etc.) that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.

You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven fundamentally from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.

Key job responsibilities
• Lead a new initiative across Sponsored Products Bidding focused on AI/ML based features.
• Be the technical leader in AI, Machine Learning; lead efforts within this team and across other teams.
• Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience.
• Drive end-to-end AI/Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity.
• Build models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your AI/ML models.
• Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis.
• Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving.
• Research new and innovative AI/ machine learning approaches.

A day in the life
Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon's Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.

Impact and Career Growth: You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.

About the team
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights.
We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising.
The SPB Bidding team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting Millions of advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in bidding systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem.
Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware bidding system that leverages auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This framework, will operate across SPB bidding system and proactively delivering value based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art bidding agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.

Basic qualifications

- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in designing experiments and statistical analysis of results

Preferred qualifications

- Experience in professional software development
- Experience in state-of-the-art deep learning models architecture design and deep learning training and optimization and model pruning

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, NY, New York - 172,400.00 - 223,400.00 USD annually
USA, WA, SEATTLE - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products Bidding 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. Open the description and count.

Key facts

Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products Bidding is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $172k-$223k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on October 16, 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

Applied ScienceModelingA B TestingAlgorithm DevelopmentPythonMachine learningDeep learning

Also common in applied scientist jobs at this level

LLM NLP TensorFlow Spark Reinforcement learning AWS

Pay

This job starts at: $172k
Typical applied scientist job: $167k

This posting starts close to the typical applied scientist job. See applied scientist jobs

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where applied science was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where modeling was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where a b testing was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where algorithm development was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used Python in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Applied Science, Modeling, A B Testing, Algorithm Development, and Python. 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.

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