Principal Applied Scientist, Prime AI/ML Science

About the role

Amazon Prime is building the future of AI-based personalization to drive long-term value from the Prime subscription. Join our team of Scientists and Engineers developing AI/ML models to predict Prime customer long-term behavior and optimize the customer experience with the Prime program. This includes identifying who our customers are, modeling customer behavior, and creating personalization systems to optimize the experience.

As an AI/ML expert, you will partner directly with product owners to define the vision for this space and drive the roadmap for team execution. This is a complex personalization and optimization challenge at the intersection of massive-scale subscription and behavioral data, real-time decision systems, hundreds of millions of customers, and other shopping and benefit data across Amazon.

Our vision is to enable a data-driven intelligent foundation that powers the future of Prime through scalable personalization, generation, and decisioning capabilities. These serve optimal, cohesive customer experiences across all touchpoints. We build the science and infrastructure that allows Prime to know each member deeply, decide what to show them and when, generate the right content in the right format, and measure whether it worked—all optimized toward long-term member value.

As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will be the intellectual engine behind this transformation. You will define the frontier, architect the science strategy for a large, cross-cutting organization, and drive breakthroughs that reshape how Prime thinks about customers and the membership program. You will pioneer next-generation Gen AI / LLM-based foundation models that build rich, evolving models of customer intent, including Gen AI/transformer architectures that abstract noisy behavioral signals into high-quality latent representations of human preference. You will also address real-time, multi-objective, globally scalable ranking systems that solve cold start problems at billions of decisions per day.

You will act as a force multiplier, building foundational technology that empowers scientists and engineers, and driving teams across Prime and Amazon to deliver the best science outcomes for customers.

Responsibilities

• Define the vision and roadmap for AI/ML-driven personalization in Prime, partnering with product owners.
• Develop predictive models and AI/ML systems to optimize long-term customer value and experience.
• Architect next-generation Gen AI / LLM-based foundation models for customer intent and preference.
• Design real-time, multi-objective ranking systems scalable to billions of decisions per day.
• Lead and mentor experienced scientists while developing junior team members for career growth.
• Drive breakthroughs in personalization and decisioning that reshape the Prime membership program.
• Build foundational technology that empowers cross-functional teams across Prime and Amazon.

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in predictive modeling and analysis.
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, handling ambiguity and competing objectives.
• Proficiency in programming with Java, C++, Python, or a related language.
• Experience leading experienced scientists and developing junior members from academia or industry.

Preferred Qualifications

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

Pay

USA, WA, Seattle - $198,900.00 - $269,000.00 USD annually.

Benefits

• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).
• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D, and optional supplemental life plans).
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Mental Health Support, and 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 amazon.jobs/en/benefits.