Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform

Amazon is hiring a Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform in Seattle, United States. It pays $199k-$269k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

On Level's scale, this applied scientist role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
The listed pay starts 16% above the typical applied scientist posting on Level.
Level classifies it as a lead role.
Level lists 20,000+ other open roles at Amazon.
The role was posted in the last few days.

AI in this role

Interested in setting the scientific vision for how every product at Amazon is understood, identified, and connected, with the opportunity to impact every Amazon customer and every selling partner?

The Items and Relationships Platform is the foundation that establishes what every product in Amazon’s catalog is and how products relate to one another. We are rebuilding the platform to establish identity and relationships from meaning and context, using multimodal large language models and generative AI. This is a foundational problem: understanding products deeply enough to identify them, relate them, and keep the catalog trustworthy as it scales to the full breadth of Amazon’s global contribution traffic.

A Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform owns the science direction for product identity and product relationships. It spans how contributions are resolved into a committed product identity, how products are connected into structural relationships (variations, multipacks, newer versions, lines of products, bundles), how confident those decisions are, and how their quality is measured. You will own the strategy for multimodal understanding, representation learning, relationship inference, calibration, and evaluation, so that science capability compounds across identity and relationships rather than being built one use case at a time.

This role lives at the intersection of research and production. Product identity and relationships are fundamentally an entity resolution problem: deciding what is the same product, and how different products relate, across diverse sources, languages, and formats. You will make the hard modeling calls on where sameness ends and relatedness begins, how models express and calibrate confidence, and how the platform measures quality when there is no external ground truth.

Successful candidates are passionate about translating ambiguous business goals into a coherent science roadmap that enables many businesses at once. You are comfortable being the final scientific arbiter on hard cross-team decisions, and working alongside top-notch applied scientists and software engineers to turn advanced research into production systems.

Key job responsibilities
As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform, you will:

- Own the science direction for product identity: define how products are semantically understood, resolved, and committed as coherent identities, navigating the precision/recall and friction/selection trade-offs inherent in every decision

- Build representations that decide both sameness and typed relatedness, and drive relationship inference from semantic identity rather than one pipeline per relationship type

- Own structural relationship science across variations, multipacks and base products, newer versions, lines of products, and bundles, and discover new relationship types from the gap between defined policy and what identity reveals

- Own calibration and evaluation science: define how models emit calibrated confidence, and build the LLM judge methodology and Catalog Identity Quality metric that measure identity and relationship quality at catalog scale

- Partner with Principal Engineers on cost-aware modeling (cascades, distillation, routing) and close the loop from production signals and corrections back into training

- Set science direction partnering with ACCS Applied Science teams, mentoring senior and principal-track scientists, and driving the documentation and publication of scientific innovation

A day in the life
On a typical day, you move between setting science direction and going deep on hard problems: reviewing a multimodal identity model or a relationship inference experiment with scientists, deciding how a borderline case (a multipack, a newer version, a near-identical variant) should be modeled, and pressure-testing whether a quality gain is real by examining the judge and its calibration. You also spend time zoomed out, shaping the longer-term science roadmap, aligning with Principal Engineers and partner teams on the identity and relationship signals they consume, and mentoring scientists as they take on the ambiguous, high-impact problems that define the platform’s future.

About the team
The Items and Relationships Platform advances state-of-the-art GenAI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and meaningfully connect every product at Amazon scale. We build the canonical product identity, matching, and relationship systems that power Amazon’s universal catalog: eliminating duplicates, preventing abuse, keeping product families coherent, and integrating the world’s product data to power agentic shopping and trusted discovery for customers worldwide. We solve foundational challenges including schema-agnostic multimodal understanding, relationship inference, evaluation without ground truth, and efficient inference at reduced cost.

Basic qualifications

- 5+ years of hands-on work in predictive modeling and analysis experience
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field
- Experience working in predictive modeling and analysis
- Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with leading experienced scientists as well as having a record of developing junior members from academia or industry to a career track in a business environment

Preferred qualifications

- 10+ years of relevant work in industry or academia experience
- Knowledge of problem solving, algorithm design and complexity analysis
- Experience creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art
- Have peer-reviewed scientific contributions in premier journals and conferences

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 - 198,900.00 - 269,000.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform at Amazon rates 10 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● 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

Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The listed salary is $199k-$269k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on November 2, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon