Principal Economist, Fulfillment by Amazon

About the role

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) enables sellers to outsource supply chain and fulfillment to Amazon, leveraging Amazon's world-class science, technology, and logistics infrastructure to deliver billions of products globally with fast delivery. As a Principal Economist, you will design markets and implement agentic systems that deploy supply chain and fulfillment resources to millions of heterogeneous sellers. You will build causal inference models and experiments to evaluate policy impact on seller outcomes, shaping how our products evolve into trustworthy autonomous systems. This role involves collaborating with business and software teams to solve key challenges facing the worldwide FBA business, including designing mechanisms to align sellers' decisions with customers' needs through better coordinating inventory, inbound, capacity, and fees.

You will shape the economics of Amazon's global fast delivery programs, including Sub Same Day Delivery and Quick Commerce, across North America, Europe, and emerging markets. The successful candidate will thrive in ambiguity, defining the roadmap rather than receiving it, and will have familiarity with modern GenAI methods for automation and rapid prototyping. Beyond individual contribution, you will set the long-term technical vision across work streams, influence product managers, engineers, scientists, and senior leaders on high-judgment decisions, and mentor junior economists and scientists.

Responsibilities

• Design markets (e.g., auctions), incentive mechanisms (e.g., pricing), develop economic models, and execute large-scale experiments to increase supply chain efficiency, evaluate seller-facing policies, induce proper seller actions, and uncover new opportunities that improve customers and sellers’ outcomes.
• Shape the economics of Amazon's fast delivery programs and FBA sellers’ product selection strategy (e.g., Sub Same Day Delivery and Quick Commerce).
• Bridge economics and operations research by building economic frameworks for large-scale supply chain and fulfillment management problems.
• Operate as a thought leader across the organization; collaborate with product managers, scientists, and software developers to incorporate models into production processes and influence senior leaders at VP-level on technical and business direction.
• Identify and propose new science investment areas to business leaders, shaping where the team focuses next.
• Mentor and develop junior economists and scientists, and raise the technical bar for the broader science community.

About the team

Sellers play a vital role in Amazon's ecosystem, integral to our mission of offering the Earth's largest selection, lowest prices, and fastest delivery speed. FBA is an optional service that enables third-party sellers to outsource order fulfillment to Amazon, leveraging Amazon's world-class facilities to provide customers with fast delivery. The FBA team manages warehousing, inventory management, fulfillment, pricing, and a diverse range of recommendation and agentic services for sellers, as well as building autonomous internal resource management systems.

We work to learn seller behavior, understand seller experience, build automated and trustworthy autonomous assistants, recommend actions to sellers, design seller policies and incentives, and develop science products and services that empower sellers to grow their businesses. Our solutions leverage tools across economics, operations research, machine learning, statistics, and data analytics. Our culture is centered on rapid prototyping, rigorous experimentation, and data-driven decision-making.

Open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Bellevue, WA, or Sunnyvale, CA.

Requirements

• PhD in Economics, Finance, Statistics, Mathematics, or a closely related quantitative field.
• 7+ years in academia, industry, consulting, or government applying economic methods to substantive problems.
• Experience in applied economic analysis with big data, causal inference, machine learning, and data science.
• Demonstrated ability to build complex economic models from scratch and take them to production.
• Proficiency in Python, R, SQL, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with GenAI methods for automation and rapid prototyping.
• A publication record or comparable body of work demonstrating research rigor.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including with non-technical senior audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep technical knowledge in causal models, econometrics, and machine learning.
• Background in industrial organization, mechanism/market design, or structural model estimation.
• Experience at the intersection of economics and operations research, particularly in supply chain, logistics, or marketplace settings.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage large datasets and economic models to drive organizational impact and change in a private or public sector context.
• Experience with production-grade languages (e.g., Java or C++) in addition to scripting/analysis tools.
• Ability to identify and successfully pitch the value of new ideas to business leaders.
• Proven ability to work effectively across product, engineering, and science teams by thinking strategically, earning trust while staying on top of tactical execution with relentlessly high standards.

Pay

The base salary range for this position is $189,400 - $256,200 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

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, and optional supplemental life plans).
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and Mental Health Support.
• Medical Advice Line and 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.