Thinking Machines LabRemote · San Francisco$350k-$475k5h ago
AmazonPosted 1mo ago
Senior Applied Scientist, Traffic Quality at Amazon scores 89 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.
AI in this role
Within Amazon Ads, Traffic Quality is a critical pillar of advertiser trust and marketplace integrity. Our mission is to build advanced capabilities that work at petabyte scale to detect sophisticated invalid traffic (IVT) which includes sophisticated non-human traffic, bot networks, and fraudulent engagement patterns across programmatic advertising. We are on a journey to establish Amazon Ads as an industry leader in traffic quality standards and transparency. Our research agenda focuses on staying ahead of adversarial actors through continuous innovation in detection methodologies, leveraging state-of-the-art techniques in deep learning and generative modeling, user behavior and multi-modal representation learning, anomaly detection, time-series analysis, and sparse labeling methods. We process billions of ad events daily, developing novel algorithms that balance precision and recall while operating under strict latency constraints. Our work directly protects hundreds of millions of dollars in advertiser spend annually while maintaining a seamless user experience.
Key job responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Vision
- Define long-term science vision for Traffic Quality driven by advertiser and publisher needs, translating direction into actionable team plans.
- Solve strategically important business problems independently, delivering robust, scalable scientific solutions with limited guidance.
- Proactively identify technology gaps and business opportunities, determining resource allocation priorities.
Scientific Innovation & Execution
- Design and implement statistical and machine learning solutions to detect robotic and human traffic patterns across billions of daily ad events.
- Own full development cycle for production-level code handling billions of ad requests: design, prototype, A/B testing, and deployment.
- Stay current with scientific advancements and build publication strategy while championing excellence best practices.
- Directly protect hundreds of millions of dollars in advertiser spend annually while maintaining seamless user experience.
- Partner with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional teams to solve complex IVT detection problems and influence strategic initiatives.
- Mentor scientists on the team.
About the team
Here are a few papers published by the team:
1/ [Scaling Generative Pre-training for User Ad Activity Sequences. AdKDD 2023.](https://assets.amazon.science/b7/42/03be071743d5a57cb1656e6caa34/scaling-generative-pre-training-for-user-ad-activity-sequences.pdf)
2/ [SLIDR: Real-time Robot Detection On Online Ads, IAAI 2023, Deployed Highly Innovative Applications of AI Track (AAAI 2023)](https://assets.amazon.science/75/2f/3b7106b143f38f7f4d2806388ace/real-time-detection-of-robotic-traffic-in-online-advertising.pdf)
3/ [Self-supervised Representation Learning Across Sequential and Tabular Features Using Transformers, NeurIPS 2022, First Table Representation Learning Workshop](https://openreview.net/forum?id=wIIJlmr1Dsk)
Basic qualifications
- 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 modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc.
- Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.
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.
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- Walk me through how you've used scikit-learn in your day-to-day work.
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- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
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- 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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