Senior Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Compression Efficiency Research Team

About the role

Prime Video is a first‑stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find movies, series, documentaries, live sports, Amazon MGM Studios‑produced content, licensed fan favorites, and programming from add‑on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store and enjoy additional free, ad‑supported content.

This position involves research and development of advanced deep‑learning models for video assets to improve visual quality—restoring defects, enhancing resolution, achieving truer colors, SDR→HDR up‑conversion, and developing better dithering/noising techniques to withstand compression artifacts. You will also create next‑generation, content‑adaptive video encoding methods, working closely with research scientists to maximize video quality under varying network conditions.

Responsibilities

• Create ground‑truth datasets and develop new video diffusion model architectures with training methodologies that ensure temporal consistency, preservation of creative intent, and high perceptual quality.
• Optimize and deploy models in production workflows, defining and measuring at‑scale success criteria.
• Apply scene‑understanding techniques at a semantic level using the latest research.
• Develop innovative solutions that balance speed versus performance, file‑size reductions, and publish novel approaches in tier‑1 conferences.
• Collaborate with research scientists specializing in video encoding/compression.
• Conduct subjective rating tests to generate ground‑truth data for model evaluation when required.
• Contribute to new video‑quality models that correlate strongly with subjective ratings and quantify improvements.
• Define and refine team processes around ML/DL model development, deployment, and guardrail definition.
• Work with Video Research Scientists to jointly define problems and technical approaches.
• Partner with academia through sponsored research programs on long‑term, complex problems.
• Interface with ML engineers to translate research outputs into production workflows.
• Develop more compute‑efficient AI workflows.
• Collaborate with product managers to shape product roadmaps aligned with business goals.
• Help hire and mentor new talent, sharing knowledge across the team.

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience building machine‑learning models for business applications.
• PhD, or a Master’s degree with 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, Python, or a related programming language.
• Experience with neural deep‑learning methods and machine learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Generative AI for image/video (e.g., diffusion models).
• Experience with objective video‑quality measurement techniques.
• Knowledge of common video defects and strategies to reduce them at scale.

Benefits

• Base salary range: $167,100 – $226,100 USD annually (Seattle, WA).
• Sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).
• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription).
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with optional supplemental life plans.
• Employee Assistance Program, mental‑health support, and medical advice line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.