AmazonPosted 4mo ago

Senior Applied Scientist

Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon scores 99 out of 100 on AI centrality, which makes it AI Level 4 of 4 (Builds AI) on this board. The level measures how much of the work is AI, not seniority.

US, WA, Seattleseniorfull-time$192k-$260k

AI in this role

prompt-engineeringfine-tuningai-research

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 identity and relationships at unprecedented scale. Using Generative AI, Visual Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal reasoning, we determine what makes each product unique and how products relate to one another across Amazon's catalog. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity—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. Establishing product identities and groupings requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data—while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily.

Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group 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 to infer product-to-product relationships that matter to our customers. 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
Key job responsibilities include:
* Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval—translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks
* Design and implement leading models leveraging VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures to solve product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding 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
* Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvements
* Mentor peer scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building organizational capability in GenAI and multimodal AI
* 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

- 4+ years of applied research experience
- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning

Preferred qualifications

- Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations
- - Prior experience in the domains of LLMs, foundation models, or large-scale deep learning systems
- - Publications in top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, COLING, KDD, SIGMOD, WWW, AAAI, or similar
- - Experience with Visual Language Models (VLMs), multimodal transformers, or vision-language pretraining
- - Experience with explainable AI, model interpretability, or uncertainty quantification
- - Strong experimental design skills and statistical analysis expertise
- - Hands-on experience with Generative AI, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RLHF, or agentic architectures

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, CA, Sunnyvale - 192,200.00 - 260,000.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 183,800.00 - 248,700.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually

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Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Prompt EngineeringFine TuningAI Research

Questions you could be asked

How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

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List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt Engineering, Fine Tuning, and AI Research. 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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