Principal Applied Scientist, Personalization

About the role

We are building the future of human-AI collaboration in commerce—an AI-native shopping partner that truly understands what customers mean, what they need, and what they haven’t yet realized they want. This role sits at the intersection of massive-scale language understanding, real-time decision systems, hundreds of millions of customers, and billions of products. As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will define the frontier, architect the science strategy for a large, multidisciplinary organization, and drive breakthroughs that reshape how Amazon thinks about customers and products at the deepest level.

You will pioneer next-generation LLM-based reasoning systems that build rich, evolving models of customer intent, design transformer architectures that abstract noisy behavioral signals into high-quality latent representations of human preference, and invent real-time, multi-objective ranking systems that balance exploration, personalization, and serendipity at billions of decisions per day. Your work will ship directly to hundreds of millions of customers, creating an immediate feedback loop between your science and real human delight.

Responsibilities

• Innovate new features and models that have huge impact on the customer experience.
• Help customers find the right products and content on their shopping journey.
• Leverage advanced machine learning to create customer shopping experiences at Amazon’s scale—reaching all Amazon customers across all countries in real time.
• Lead a multidisciplinary team across science, product, design, and engineering to see ideas from inception to launch.
• Drive the science roadmap across multiple teams, coordinating a cohesive science agenda.
• Mentor applied scientists across the organization, growing their skills and careers.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or related field, OR Master’s degree and 6+ years of applied research experience.
• 5+ years of building machine learning models for business applications, with a proven track record of shipping ML-powered products to production.
• Deep expertise in machine learning engineering with hands-on experience building and deploying models at scale.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java, C++, or related languages with the ability to write production-quality code.
• Experience mentoring junior scientists and engineers.
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art.
• Publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, KDD, RecSys) or patents demonstrating technical innovation.
• Track record of successful production ML deployments at scale with measurable business impact.
• Strategic thinking combined with strong execution capability and bias for action.
• Experience bridging research with practical engineering implementation.
• Technical leadership experience in fast-paced, ambiguous environments.

About the team

Our mission is to delight every Amazon customer with a personalized shopping experience tailored to their intent. We achieve this through investments in Science, UX, and central systems to deliver the future of shopping on Amazon. We are seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the science charter across the recommendations and intent identification space.