Applied Scientist

About the Role

Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help 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

• Formulate open research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal reasoning, and large-scale information retrieval—defining the scientific questions that transform ambiguous, real-world catalog challenges into publishable, high-impact research
• Push the boundaries of VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures by designing novel approaches to product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding—where the problem complexity (billions of products, multimodal signals, inherent ambiguity) demands methods that don't yet exist
• Advance the science of efficient model deployment—developing distillation, compression, and LLM/VLM serving optimization strategies that preserve frontier-level multimodal reasoning in compact, production-grade architectures while dramatically reducing latency, cost, and infrastructure footprint at billion-product scale
• Make frontier models reliable—advancing uncertainty calibration, confidence estimation, and interpretability methods so that frontier-scale GenAI systems can be trusted for autonomous catalog decisions impacting millions of customers daily
• Own the full research lifecycle from problem formulation through production deployment—designing rigorous experiments over petabytes of multimodal data, iterating on ideas rapidly, and seeing your research directly improve the shopping experience for hundreds of millions of customers
• Shape the team's research vision by defining technical roadmaps that balance foundational scientific inquiry with measurable product impact
• Mentor scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building deep 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

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LLMs, VLMs, foundation models, or large-scale deep learning systems—including multimodal pretraining, fine-tuning, RLHF, prompt engineering, or agentic architectures
• Experience with LLM/VLM serving optimization, including model distillation, quantization, pruning, speculative decoding, or other model compression and efficient inference techniques
• Experience with explainable AI, model interpretability, or uncertainty quantification
• Strong experimental design skills and statistical analysis expertise
• Track record of deploying ML models at scale in production environments processing billions of data points
• Publications in top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, EMNLP, ACL, NAACL, COLING, KDD, SIGMOD, WWW, AAAI, or similar
• Excellent written, verbal communication & data presentation skills

Pay

Base salary range: USA, WA, Seattle - $142,800.00 - $193,200.00 USD annually. 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.

Benefits

Amazon 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.

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