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 global science, technology, and logistics infrastructure to deliver billions of products worldwide with fast delivery. As a Principal Economist, you will design markets and implement agentic systems to deploy supply chain and fulfillment resources for millions of heterogeneous sellers. You will build causal inference models and experiments to evaluate policy impact on seller outcomes, shaping how FBA products evolve into trustworthy autonomous systems. This role involves collaborating with business and software teams to address key challenges in the worldwide FBA business, including aligning sellers' decisions with customer needs through better coordination of 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 ideal candidate thrives in ambiguity, defining the roadmap rather than following it, and is familiar with modern GenAI methods for automation and rapid prototyping. Beyond individual contributions, you will set the long-term technical vision, influence product managers, engineers, scientists, and senior leaders, and mentor junior economists and scientists.

Responsibilities

• Design markets (e.g., auctions), incentive mechanisms (e.g., pricing), and develop economic models to execute large-scale experiments that increase supply chain efficiency, evaluate seller-facing policies, induce proper seller actions, and uncover opportunities to improve customer and seller 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.
• Influence senior leaders at the VP-level on technical and business direction, representing the science perspective.
• Identify and propose new science investment areas to business leaders, shaping the team’s future focus.
• Mentor and develop junior economists and scientists, raising the technical bar for the broader science community.

About the team

Sellers are integral to Amazon's mission of offering the Earth's largest selection, lowest prices, and fastest delivery. FBA is an optional service that allows third-party sellers to outsource order fulfillment to Amazon, leveraging Amazon's world-class facilities for fast delivery. The FBA team manages warehousing, inventory, fulfillment, pricing, and a range of recommendation and agentic services for sellers, as well as autonomous internal resource management systems.

The team focuses on understanding seller behavior and experience, building automated and trustworthy autonomous assistants, recommending actions to sellers, designing seller policies and incentives, and developing science-driven products and services. We innovate using tools from economics, operations research, machine learning, statistics, and data analytics, emphasizing rapid prototyping, rigorous experimentation, and data-driven decision-making.

Open to hiring in Bellevue, WA, or Sunnyvale, CA.

Qualifications

• PhD in Economics, Finance, Statistics, Mathematics, or a closely related quantitative field.
• 7+ years of experience 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 private or public sectors.
• 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 while maintaining high standards in tactical execution.

Pay

Base salary range: $189,400 – $256,200 USD annually (Bellevue, WA). Your total compensation package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and location.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, basic life & AD&D, with options for supplemental life plans).
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP), mental health support, and medical advice line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs).
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.

Learn more about our benefits at amazon.jobs/en/benefits.