Senior Applied Scientist, Delivery Foundation Model

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. We are seeking an exceptional Senior Applied Scientist to help develop innovative foundation models that enable delivery of billions of packages worldwide.

About the role

In this role, you'll combine highly technical work with scientific leadership, ensuring the team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. Your team will leverage Amazon's vast data and computational resources to tackle ambitious problems across a diverse set of Amazon delivery use cases.

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 infrastructure 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 with 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.

Qualifications

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.

Pay

• USA, CA, Santa Clara: $192,200.00 - $260,000.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Bellevue: $167,100.00 - $226,100.00 USD annually

Benefits

Amazon offers comprehensive benefits including:

• Health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans).
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).

Learn more about our benefits at Amazon Jobs Benefits.