Applied Scientist, Customer360

Amazon serves hundreds of millions of customers. Each one has a unique history of purchases, preferences, and behaviors. Our team's mission: turn that history into real-time contextual intelligence that makes every Amazon experience feel personal.

We're hiring an Applied Scientist to push the boundaries of what's possible with LLMs, semantic retrieval, and customer understanding at scale.

The problem space: Imagine a system that can instantly synthesize years of customer signals — what they bought, what they love, what they're planning — and surface the exact right context for any experience, in milliseconds. That's what we build. It's equal parts information retrieval, generative AI, and systems engineering.

Why this role:

1. Scale: Your models will serve 1,500+ requests per second across Amazon's largest surfaces.
2. Impact: Direct revenue attribution in the hundreds of millions — your work shows up in customer experiences the same week.
3. Frontier tech: Fine-tuning LLMs, building custom embedding models, designing retrieval architectures that balance quality with sub-100ms latency constraints.
4. Data richness: Access to one of the most comprehensive customer behavior datasets anywhere.
5. Ownership: End-to-end — from research to production deployment to metric evaluation.

Key job responsibilities
1. Invent new approaches to contextual retrieval, relevance scoring, and LLM-based summarization.
2. Fine-tune and evaluate language models for domain-specific understanding.
3. Design experiments that measure real customer impact, not just benchmark scores.
4. Ship production systems and iterate based on live metrics.
5. Collaborate across teams — Alexa, Search, Recommendations — as a platform that powers them all.
6. Mentor team members and shape the technical direction of our roadmap.

Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information.

A day in the life
You'll analyze large-scale behavioral data, design experiments, and build models that ship to production. You'll work closely with engineers to ensure your science translates into low-latency, high-reliability systems. You'll present findings to leadership and influence product strategy. Some weeks you'll be deep in model architecture; other weeks you'll be debugging a relevance gap in production. Every day, your work reaches real customers.

About the team
We're a small, high-impact team that values scientific rigor and engineering craft equally. The team values innovations and offers a safe place to try, fail and learn while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Everyone is a leader and owner for everything we do as a team. Our team offers creative space with entrepreneurial work environment focusing on customer obsession.

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing
- Experience in designing experiments and statistical analysis of results
- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience using Unix/Linux
- Experience in professional software development

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

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.

USA, WA, Seattle - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually