Senior Applied Scientist, Sponsored Products Bidding

About the role

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon.

The SP team's primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day.

Within Sponsored Products, the Bidding team is responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products around bid controls (dynamic bidding, bid recommendations, etc.) that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit—with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.

You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.

Responsibilities

• Lead a new initiative across Sponsored Products Bidding focused on AI/ML-based features.
• Be the technical leader in AI and Machine Learning; lead efforts within this team and across other teams.
• Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience.
• Drive end-to-end AI/Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, and complexity.
• Build models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your AI/ML models.
• Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis.
• Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation, and serving.
• Research new and innovative AI/machine learning approaches.
• Recruit Applied Scientists to the team and provide mentorship.
• Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven fundamentally from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams.

About the team

The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle—from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights.

The SPB Bidding team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting millions of advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in bidding systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem.

Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware bidding system that leverages auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This framework will operate across the SPB bidding system and proactively deliver value based on a deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience.

Requirements

• 3+ years of building machine learning models for business applications.
• 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 AI/ML technologies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, TensorFlow, numpy, scipy, etc.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark, etc.

Pay

USA, NY, New York - $183,800.00 - $248,700.00 USD annually

USA, WA, Seattle - $167,100.00 - $226,100.00 USD annually

Benefits

• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).
• 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.

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