Senior Applied Scientist
Key job responsibilities
- Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval—translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks
- Design and implement leading models leveraging VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures to solve product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding at billion-product scale
- Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions
- Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment—processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks
- Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvements
- Mentor peer scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building 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
- 4+ years of applied research experience
- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
- Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations
- Experience with Visual Language Models (VLMs), multimodal transformers, or vision-language pretraining
- Experience with explainable AI, model interpretability, or uncertainty quantification
- Strong experimental design skills and statistical analysis expertise
- Hands-on experience with Generative AI, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RLHF, or agentic architectures
- 4+ years of applied research experience
- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
- Experience with training and deploying machine learning systems to solve large-scale optimizations
- Experience with Visual Language Models (VLMs), multimodal transformers, or vision-language pretraining
- Experience with explainable AI, model interpretability, or uncertainty quantification
- Strong experimental design skills and statistical analysis expertise
- Hands-on experience with Generative AI, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RLHF, or agentic architectures
Basic Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
About the role
At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product identity and relationships at unprecedented scale.
Responsibilities
The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Establishing product identities and groupings requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data—while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily.
Requirements
Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to 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.
Qualifications
Skills
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. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
Pay
The base salary range for this position is listed below. 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. Amazon also 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. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
Schedule
Amazon offers flexible scheduling options to accommodate the diverse needs of its employees. Learn more about our schedules at https://amazon.jobs/en/schedules.