Senior Applied Scientist

At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product identity and relationships at unprecedented scale. Using Generative AI, Visual Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal reasoning, we determine what makes each product unique and how products relate to one another across Amazon's catalog. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity—from electronics to groceries to digital content.The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Establishing product identities and groupings requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data—while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily.Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services to infer product-to-product relationships that matter to our customers. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers.Key job responsibilitiesFormulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval—translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworksDesign and implement systems leveraging VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures to solve product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding at billion-product scalePioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisionsOptimize and scale large-language-model inference pipelines, including model compression, parallelization, and workflow orchestration, to support massive-volume LLM workflows with low latency and high reliability.Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvementsMentor junior scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building organizational capability in GenAI and multimodal AIRepresent the team in the broader science community—publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system researchBASIC QUALIFICATIONS- 4+ years of applied research experience- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience- 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 learningPREFERRED 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.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.