Senior Applied Scientist, Delivery Foundation Model

About the role

Join the next science and engineering revolution at Amazon's Delivery Foundation Model team, where you'll work alongside world-class scientists and engineers to pioneer the next frontier of logistics through advanced AI and foundation models.

Key job responsibilities

• Design and implement novel deep learning architectures combining a multitude of modalities, including image, video, and geospatial data.
• Solve computational problems to train foundation models on vast amounts of Amazon data and infer at Amazon scale, taking advantage of latest developments in hardware and deep learning libraries.
• As a foundation model developer, collaborate with multiple science and engineering teams to help build adaptations that power use cases across Amazon Last Mile deliveries, improving experience and safety of a delivery driver, an Amazon customer, and improving efficiency of Amazon delivery network.
• Guide technical direction for specific research initiatives, ensuring robust performance in production environments.
• Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions.

A day in the life

• Develop and implement novel foundation model architectures, working hands-on with data and our extensive training and evaluation infrastructure
• Guide and support fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from trajectory planning to efficient multi-task learning
• Guide and support fellow engineers in building scalable and reusable infra to support model training, evaluation, and inference
• Lead focused technical initiatives from conception through deployment, ensuring successful integration with production systems
• Drive technical discussions within the team and and key stakeholders
• Conduct experiments and prototype new ideas
• Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions

About the team

The Delivery Foundation Model team combines ambitious research vision with real-world impact. Our foundation models provide generative reasoning capabilities required to meet the demands of Amazon's global Last Mile delivery network. We leverage Amazon's unparalleled computational infrastructure and extensive datasets to deploy state-of-the-art foundation models to improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of Amazon deliveries. Our work spans the full spectrum of foundation model development, from multimodal training using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated modeling strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We build everything end to end, from data preparation to model training and evaluation to inference, along with all the tooling needed to understand and analyze model performance.

Basic Qualifications

• PhD in engineering, technology, computer science, machine learning, robotics, operations research, statistics, mathematics or equivalent quantitative field, or Master's degree and 10+ years of industry or academic research experience
• 5+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience
• Proficient with Data, experience with SQL and Spark
• Expert coders comfortable working in production environments using Python, C++ or other languages
• Strong publication record at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, RSS, CoRL) OR Demonstrated experience in applying machine learning innovation in industry
• Experience mentoring junior scientists / engineers

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building foundation models for industry or research
• Experience designing multi-modal model architectures
• Experience building models for motion prediction, e.g. autonomous driving
• Track record of successful production ML deployments
• Experience with large-scale distributed environments for ML training and inference
• History of impactful first-author publications at major conferences