Principal Applied Scientist, Shopping Discovery & Evaluation

The Community Feedback organization owns the experiences and systems that enable shoppers to provide and review trusted customer-generated content across the shopping journey. We bring together trusted, authentic inputs from the community and surface them with the help of AI so that customers can make effortless, high-confidence purchase decisions. Features such as Customer Reviews, Content Moderation, and Customer Questions & Answers (Q&A) build a rewarding and engaging experience for creators to share their feedback, providing shoppers with trusted insights based on this feedback to inform their shopping decisions. Our vision is to make Amazon the internet’s most trustworthy, helpful, and delightful guide for customers on any shopping mission. Community Feedback materially impacts every retail marketplace, category and selling partner. Our features are a highly visible product, serving hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Our team was the first to launch a customer-facing experience on Amazon that uses generative AI. Customer Reviews has received overwhelming press coverage and S-Team visibility due to the launch of the “Review Highlights” feature - an AI-generated summary of text-based customer reviews. Since then, all customer-generated content has been used to power multiple high-profile experiences across the store such as Amazon’s Shopping AI Assistant (Rufus).

The Principal Applied Scientist will be a thought leader and innovator to power this momentum and unlock further future value for customers. This role owns strategic projects in new and ambiguous areas leveraging advanced machine learning techniques to create new scalable products. The customer problems to solve for can vary from how to rank and search content across the store, detect and mitigate abuse vectors such as fake reviews, to aggregate and summarize insights to help customers discover, compare, and purchase products at Amazon. This role requires experience and domain knowledge in NLP and ML, together with effective communication and collaboration skills to influence across multiple partnership teams including Search, Personalization, Rufus (Amazon’s Shopping AI Assistant) and Alexa. This position can be located in Barcelona, Madrid, or Berlin.

Key job responsibilities

• As a Principal Applied Scientist, you are a trusted part of the technical leadership.
• You bring business and industry context to science and technology decisions.
• You set the standard for scientific excellence and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms.
• You solicit differing views across the organization and are willing to change your mind as you learn more.
• You are a hands-on scientific leader tackling intrinsically hard problems, whose solutions are exemplary in terms of algorithm design, clarity, model structure, efficiency, and extensibility.
• You will be responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice.
• You will develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them.
• You will also participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship, and leadership development.
• You will be technically fearless and have a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions.
• You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance).

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science.
• 10+ years of combined academic and research experience.
• Strong publication record in top-tier journals and conferences.
• Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions.
• Can successfully sell ideas to an executive level decision maker.
• Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues.
• Experience developing software in traditional programming languages (C++, Java, Python, etc.).
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience building and deploying innovative machine learning solutions at scale for 10+ years.
• Expert level skills across many Machine Learning methodologies.
• Published research work in academic conferences or industry circles.
• Experience delivering complex end-to-end global ML solutions that run at very large scale.
• Experience working with real-world data sets and building scalable models from big data.
• Thinks strategically, but stays on top of tactical execution.
• Exhibits excellent business judgment; balances business, product, and technology very well.
• An independent thinker who can make convincing, information-based arguments.
• With a strong bias for action, this individual will work equally well with science, engineering, economics, and business teams.
• This person will have sound judgment and be able to recruit and develop high calibre talent.

Amazon is an equal opportunities employer. We believe passionately that employing a diverse workforce is central to our success. We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify and build. Protecting your privacy and the security of your data is a longstanding top priority for Amazon.

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.