David Kosbie in a classroom with students in Rwanda
David Kosbie, an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-founder of CMU's Computer Science Academy, went to Rwanda in the summer of 2018 to teach students at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village school computer-science skills.
Credit: David Kosbie

Amazon donation boosts innovative computer science education program

$2 million commitment to Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Academy extends opportunities to students in underserved middle and high schools.

By Douglas Gantenbein
December 08, 2020
Share

In the summer of 2018, David Kosbie visited a school for orphans and other young people in rural Rwanda. Kosbie — an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) — was there to watch the school work with curriculum from CMU’s Computer Science Academy he helped co-found as a way to reach students who lack access to computer science curriculum.

“The computer-science students would come in early and leave late,” he recalls. “On my last day there, they tried to convince me not to go to the airport to go home.”

What had the students buzzing was the chance to learn advanced computer-science and programming skills — opportunities they’d never had before. That was due to the Computer Science Academy’s online classes and teacher training, which is giving these students a chance to develop 21st century skills.

“It was just so heart-warming,” Kosbie adds. “I’ve sent some of my CMU students to that same school, and for each one it was a life-altering experience. The life stories of these students is mostly tragic, but yet the school (Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village) is one of the most joyous places I have ever been.”

David Kosbie
David Kosbie launched CMU's Computer Science Academy in 2018 with colleague Mark Stehlik.
Credit: CMU

Launched in 2018 by Kosbie and CMU colleague Mark Stehlik, CMU CS Academy is a rigorous online computer-science program that has reached more than 5,600 teachers and mentors and 61,000 students around the world, giving a boost to schools that have limited opportunities to offer students computer science or programming classes. The academy is free to schools that participate, and offers free online and in-person teacher training and support.

Amazon has now announced it will provide $2 million to support CMU CS Academy over the next three years. The donation comes from Amazon Future Engineer, Amazon’s childhood-to-career computer science education program aimed at educating and training students from underserved and underrepresented communities. 

The donation comes at a great time, says Kosbie. CMU CS Academy is growing at a rapid clip. “That $2 million will pretty much cover our current operations for three years,” he says. “It will help us with course production, and course hosting, and professional development for teachers. It also will begin to help us expand our efforts to produce CMU CS Academy in different languages.”

Most importantly, he says, it will allow CMU CS Academy to pursue its twin goals of helping students entering the world of computer science, while creating a bigger, more diverse and equitable pipeline of programmers and computer scientists. “Tech companies just can’t find enough talent,” says Kosbie. “And because of the way equity issues play out in schools, a high percentage of the best and brightest have little hope of getting into this pipeline. Amazon, of course, gets that, and is working to change that with Amazon Future Engineer.”

CMU CS Academy offers a rigorous introduction to computer science. “While we are designed to reach all students at all levels, we're CMU and we have to uphold high standards,” Kosbie says. “This is not just a gentle taste of programming where when you’re finished you know what programming is but can’t program. This is the real deal.”

Although challenging, classes also are designed to be fun, with a strong emphasis on creativity and graphics. In addition, many of the exercises are designed by CMU students — the logic being that, as recent high-schoolers themselves, they have a good sense of what is relevant to CMU CS Academy’s primary audience.

CMU CS Academy currently offers three core curricula: A basic course for middle schools, school camps, or out-of-school programs; a robust introduction to learning programming through graphics and animations for middle and high schools; and a prep course for students preparing to take advanced placement tests or to take computer science courses in college. It also offers teacher training, 24/7 support, and teacher resources.

Because classes often are taught in schools that lack great technical resources — 60 percent of participating US public schools are Title I schools that receive federal funds — they’re designed to run on rudimentary computer equipment and weaker internet connections.

Looking forward, Kosbie says that in addition to underwriting CMU CS Academy operations, Amazon’s donation will help it focus on developing methods for measuring the actual impact of its classes — whether they boost achievement, what career paths graduates take, how college acceptance rates change. “We want to be able to go to prospective donors and scientifically show them that what we’re doing works,” he says. “So far we’re hearing very promising qualitative results, but we want to back that up with sound quantitative results.”

Ultimately, Kosbie sees CMU CS Academy as a vehicle for giving young people a hand they might not otherwise receive. “We’re doing this because we know this is the right thing to do,” he says. “We have been unbelievably blessed by being skilled and experienced in a discipline that is very rewarding personally but also financially. We feel an obligation to share these opportunities with students who might not otherwise have them.

"We look forward to seeing the impact students with varying backgrounds will have on our world after building these fundamental computer science skills.”

More information about the donation is available in this Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science press release. To learn about the different ways you can engage with Amazon's scientific community, visit our Academic Engagements page.

Tags
Share
About the Author
Douglas Gantenbein
Douglas Gantenbein is a contributor to Amazon Science.

Work with us

See more jobs
Senior Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Performance Advertising sits at the intersection of e-commerce and advertising, developing new native advertising experiences that are a critical area of strategic focus for the company. Amazon Sponsored Brands is an always-on advertising product that amplifies brand content to shoppers researching on Amazon through prominent cost-per-click ads. As we move up the purchase funnel, and create more touch points for shoppers, Sponsored Brands plays a key role in the discoverability and reach of brand content. Amazon Sponsor Brands is looking for a scientist to lead innovation for our global advertising marketplace. At the heart of our advertising business are systems for optimizing the ad marketplace involving sourcing and targeting, experimentation infrastructure, AI methods for inference and control, as well as metrics-driven closed loop optimizations.Job Responsibilities:· Design, develop, and productionize end-to-end machine learning solutions.· Work closely with software engineers and data scientists on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production· Run regular A/B experiments, gather data, perform statistical analysis, and communicate the impact to senior management· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving· Provide technical leadership, research new machine learning approaches to drive continued scientific innovation· Be a member of the Amazon-wide Machine Learning Community, participating in internal and external MeetUps, Hackathons and Conferences· Help attract, lead, and mentor technical talent.Impact and Career Growth:· You will invent new shopper and advertiser experiences, and accelerate the pace of Machine Learning and Optimization.· Influence customer facing shopping experiences to helping suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising, this role will be powering the engine of one the fastest growing businesses at Amazon.· Define a long-term science vision for our ad marketplace, driven fundamentally from the needs of our customers, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This is a role that combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus and business understanding.Why you love this opportunity:Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities.
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Are you passionate about big data and machine learning? Do you enjoy solving complex analytical problems, build predictive analytics models and develop insights and recommendations at web scale? Do you want to make an impact in Amazon’s multi-billion-dollar Affiliate marketing business? Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, spans a large number of websites and blogs worldwide that create compelling original content to help customers make informed purchase decisions for new products and programs (e.g., Prime, Amazon Video, etc.) on Amazon. We are looking for a strong Applied Scientist to work backwards from customers, create models and develop insights, deliver impact, and drive growth of the Associates Program worldwide.As as Applied Scientist in the Amazon Associates org, you will be working with business stakeholders, product/program managers, developers and executives to deeply understand customer problems and priorities. You will form hypotheses, analyze the corpus of associates and customer data using statistical methods, build predictive models, generate recommendations to address a range of problems across the associates program. These span developing insights on customer and associates engagement trends, building models to inform rates and bounties, defining segmentation for marketing, building customized guidance to optimize associates engagement with customers, developing risk models and reputation scores, etc. Your expertise will enable us to accelerate the grow of the associates business. You will be comfortable with big data systems, intimately familiar with advanced machine learning and statistical methods, and experienced in applying these to solve business problems. You will have a strong bias towards customer obsession and delivering results while dealing with ambiguity in fast-paced dynamic environments.Roles and Responsibilities· Work with business teams, product/program managers, engineers and leadership to identify and prioritize customer and business problems· Translate these problems into specific analytical questions and form hypotheses that can be answered with available data using statistical methods or identify additional data needed in the master datasets to fill any gaps· Perform hand-on data analyses and modeling with huge datasets to develop insights and recommendations to inform decisions across the program· Design and run A/B experiments to validate the hypotheses and evaluate the impact of your optimizations and communicate your results to various stakeholders· Collaborate with engineers and product managers to build scalable solutions and new capabilities
Data Science Manager
US, NY, New York
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class Advertising business and the Media Planning Science team (MPSci) sits in one of the most strategic parts of this investment. We own science based products and Machine Learning algorithms that help advertisers set up the most efficient campaigns, as well as the APIs that expose our products to internal and external customers. Advertiser success is core to Amazon’s growth. Our recommendations are backed by state-of-the-art algorithms that help advertisers drive awareness, consideration, and purchase of their products by hundreds of millions of shoppers around the world. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented pace and constantly opening up new opportunities. Our goal is to leverage data, science, and engineering to build products that recommend to advertisers the optimal set of campaign parameters that can help them reach their objectives.As a Data Science leader on this team, you and your team will be working with large retail and advertising datasets to unearth unique insights to back strategic recommendations for our customers. You will lead the development of statistical and machine learning models, working closely with software development engineers to implement these models at scale. You will share in the ownership of the technical vision and direction for advanced analytics and insight products. We are looking for a manager who can thrive in a startup environment, thinks big, can move fast, and wants to change the way customers insights to drive impact. If you excel at proposing and developing unique analytical insights and are passionate about creating the future, come join us as we work hard, have fun, and make history.In this role you will:· Build and develop a science team, providing mentorship and coaching to support career growth.· Facilitate innovation on behalf of our customers by developing and driving a long-term analytical strategy.· Identify opportunities to use Machine Learning techniques to predict advertising outcomes.· Partner with our engineering team to develop and scale successful POCs into production-ready models.· Define and use data that can assess the quality and scalability of solutions on an ongoing basis.· Act as a science domain expert in data science, machine learning, and statistics.Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products 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, 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.Impact and Career Growth: 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 is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
Applied Scientist, Amazon Scout - Simulation
US, WA, Seattle
Are you inspired by building new technologies to benefit customers? Do you dream of being at the forefront of and system technology? Would you enjoy working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, start-up like environment? If you answered yes to any of these then you've got to check out the Amazon Scout team.We’ve been hard at work developing a new, fully-electric delivery system – Amazon Scout – designed to get packages to customers using delivery devices. These devices were created by Amazon, are the size of a small cooler, and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace. We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle, ensuring the devices can safely and efficiently navigate around pets, pedestrians and anything else in their path.The Amazon Scout team shares a passion for innovation using advanced technologies, a love of solving complex challenges, and a desire to impact customers in a meaningful way. We're looking for individuals who like dealing with ambiguity, solving hard, large scale problems, and working in a startup like environment. To learn more about Amazon Scout, check out our Amazon Day One Blog post here: http://amazon.com/scoutAs part of the simulation team, you will be working on building a virtual world for development and testing of robot autonomy software. You will collaborate with leading experts in robotics, computer vision, autonomy and sensor fusion to simulate delivery at scale. You will be adding robot-centric features to our cloud-based virtual reality environment.
Sr Mgr, Science Product
US, WA, Seattle
Within Alexa Shopping, we are forming a new, insurgent team to better serve Alexa customers who are less engaged with Amazon stores. This is a large cohort of customers who want to use Alexa as their Shopping assistant and we want to meet the particular needs of these customers. The first job is to understand these customers better, how they shop in and out of Amazon stores, how they use Alexa and Alexa Shopping features, and what gaps remain between their needs and the features we have today.A day in the lifeYou will use data science to better understand how we can fulfill Alexa Shopping’s aspirations to be the anywhere shopping AI for with a focus on customers who are less engaged with Amazon. In the first months on the job, you will hire a new team and undertake a deep dive on this customer cohort using data on Amazon shopping behaviors, Alexa feature usage and primary research on their needs. This deep dive will lead to specific marketing program, feature and product ideas. You will influence the most senior leaders in the Alexa Shopping organization to steer marketing and feature roadmaps in order to better serve these customers. In the first year, you will write several PRFAQs for new feature and product ideas and you will advocate for them at the highest levels of the organization.About the hiring groupAt Alexa Shopping, we strive to enable shopping in everyday life through technology innovations in both voice and screen applications, from organizing shopping to covering in the moment shopping needs. We allow customers to create, add to, and collaborate on shopping lists that can be used in any store and to instantly order whatever they need, by simply interacting with their Smart Devices such as Echo or Fire TV. Our products range from package tracking to shopping lists and instant ordering, and with these capabilities we seek to make advertising more actionable and useful to customers. The business is both focused on generating value for shoppers as well as advertisers.Job responsibilities· Use data science to understand the shopping behaviors and needs of Alexa customers who are less engaged in Amazon stores· Hire and develop a nimble team of insurgents· Identify marketing and product gaps between our current feature portfolio and the needs of this customer cohort· Develop and experiment with product, feature and program ideas (e.g. write PRFAQs) and advocate for them at the highest levels of leadership in the organizationAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Applied Scientist - Personalization
GB, MLN, Edinburgh
We’re looking for a Machine Learning Scientist in the Personalization team for our Edinburgh office. You will be responsible for developing and disseminating customer-facing personalized recommendation algorithms. This is a hands-on role with global impact working with a team of world-class engineers and scientists across the Edinburgh offices and wider organization.You will design deep learning algorithms that scale to very large quantities of data, and serve high-scale low-latency recommendations to all customers worldwide. You will embody scientific rigor, designing and executing experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. You will work alongside more senior team members to delight customers by aiding in recommendations relevancy, and raise the profile of Amazon as a global leader in machine learning and personalization.Successful candidates will have strong technical ability, focus on customers by applying a customer-first approach, excellent teamwork and communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. Our position offers exceptional opportunities for every candidate to grow their technical and non-technical skills. If you are selected, you have the opportunity to make a difference to our business by designing and building state of the art machine learning systems on big data, leveraging Amazon’s vast computing resources (AWS), working on exciting and challenging projects, and delivering meaningful results to customers world-wide.Key responsibilities· Develop deep learning algorithms for high-scale recommendations problem· Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, making use of both quantitative analysis and business judgement.· Collaborate with software engineering teams to integrate successful experimental results into large-scale, highly complex Amazon production systems capable of handling 100,000s of transactions per second at low latency.· Report results in a manner which is both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant, exemplifying good scientific practice in a business environment.
Applied Scientist, Alexa
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Machine Learning Scientist with a strong machine learning background to help build industry-leading Alexa Speech and Language technology. Our mission is to push the envelope in Deep Learning, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.Our Machine Learning Scientists, work with talented peers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art in spoken language. Your work will directly impact our customers in speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in spoken language understanding. Candidates can work in Seattle OR Sunnyvale.
Applied Scientist, Alexa AI
CA, ON, Toronto
We’re looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist to help build industry-leading technologies in language processing.Job responsibilitiesAs an Applied Scientist with the Alexa Artificial Intelligence (AI) team, you will be responsible for developing novel algorithms that advance the state-of-the-art in language processing and entity resolution, driving model and algorithmic improvements, formulating evaluation methodologies and for influencing design and architecture choices. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to build novel products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will work in a hybrid, fast-paced organization where scientists and engineers work together and drive improvements to production. You will collaborate with and mentor other scientists to raise the bar of scientific research in Amazon.Amazon is committed to providing accommodations at all stages through recruitment and employment in accordance with applicable human rights and accommodation legislation. If contacted for an employment opportunity, please advise Human Resources if you require accommodation, including in order to apply for a position.
Senior Applied Scientist, Alexa AI
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to join Alexa Artificial Intelligence (AI) - the science team behind Amazon’s intelligence voice assistance system? Do you want to utilize cutting-edge deep-learning and machine learning algorithms to delight millions of Alexa users around the world?If your answers to these questions are “yes”, then come join us with the Alexa AI team, which is in charge of improving Alexa user satisfaction through real-time metrics monitoring and continuous closed-loop learning. The team owns the modules that reduce user perceived defects and frictions through utterance reformulation, contextual and personalized hypothesis ranking.With the Alexa AI team, you will be working alongside a team of experienced machine/deep learning scientists and engineers to create data driven machine learning models and solutions on tasks such as sequence-to-sequence query reformulation, graph feature embedding, personalized ranking, etc..Job responsibilitiesYou will be expected to:· Analyze, understand, and model user-behavior and the user-experience based on large scale data, to detect key factors causing satisfaction and dissatisfaction (SAT/DSAT).· Build and measure novel online & offline metrics for personal digital assistants and user scenarios, on diverse devices and endpoints· Create and innovate deep learning and/or machine learning based algorithms for utterance reformulation and contextual hypothesis ranking to reduce user dissatisfaction in various scenarios;· Perform model/data analysis and monitor user-experienced based metrics through online A/B testing;· Research and implement novel machine learning and deep learning algorithms and modelsAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to help Amazon provide the best customer experience by preventing eCommerce fraud?Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and creating state-of-the-art algorithms to solve real world problems?Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you enjoy collaborating in a diverse team environment?If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Amazon Buyer Risk Prevention (BRP) Machine Learning group. We are looking for a talented scientist who is passionate to build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage safety of millions of transactions every day.Major responsibilities· Use statistical and machine learning techniques to create scalable risk management systems· Learning and understanding large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data for specific instances of risk or broader risk trends· Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for risk management· Working closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations· Working closely with operations staff to optimize risk management operations,· Establishing scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation· Tracking general business activity and providing clear, compelling management reporting on a regular basis· Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approachesPlease visit https://www.amazon.science for more informationAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Senior Quantum Research Scientist
DE, BE, Berlin
Do you want to work as part of a team developing practical quantum technologies for AWS?Quantum technologies are rapidly emerging from the realms of science-fiction, and our customers can the see the potential they have to address their challenges. One of our missions at AWS is to give customers access to the most innovative technology available and help them continuously reinvent their business. Quantum technologies hold promise to be transformational in many industries, and we are adding quantum computing, networking and sensing resources to the toolkits of every researcher and developer.AWS is looking for Sr. Quantum Research Scientists to join an exceptional team of researchers and engineers. As a Sr. Research Scientist on the quantum networking team, you will:· Develop architectures, algorithms and applications for quantum networking.· Play a key role in shaping the development roadmap of the service, and evangelizing new features and capabilities· Have the opportunity to create narrative papers, write blogs, build demos and generate other reusable collateral that can be used by our customers· Establish thought leadership of AWS in the field by publishing research in journals and speaking at international scientific conferences· Most importantly, work closely with the broader AWS infrastructure teams to integrate quantum technologies and make them accessible to our customers· Mentor and develop more junior ScientistsThis role is based in the AWS Cambridge office but will involve collaboration internationally across the entire Amazon Quantum Computing organization.Our team is dedicated to supporting new team members. Our team has a broad mix of experience levels and Amazon tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship.Our team is intentional about attracting, developing, and retaining amazing talent from diverse backgrounds. We’re looking for a new teammate who is enthusiastic, empathetic, curious, motivated, reliable, and able to work effectively with a diverse team of peers; someone who will help us amplify the positive & inclusive team culture we’ve been building.
Applied Scientist - AWS Lablets
DE, BW, Tuebingen
Are you interested in working on fascinating scientific and engineering challenges of modern AI? Would you like to contribute to the development of the future generation of cloud computing at Amazon Web Services?As an Applied Scientist, you will be working on cutting edge research at the intersection of deep learning and causal inference. You will be part of an ambitious and multidisciplinary team of scientists and software engineers that is together developing novel tools to learn and exploit causal knowledge from real-world visual data.The AWS Causal Representation Learning Lab is located at the Tübingen site in Germany. Our goal is to develop the next generation of AI algorithms by learning and exploiting causal invariances extracted from non-i.i.d. visual data. Going beyond mere correlations, we quantify the causes of observations and provide robust predictions. Our mission is to provide credible and reliable AI models that do not fail unexpectedly under distribution shifts. The successful applicant will have previous research experience with either representation learning or causality, with an interest in the other.As an Applied Scientist in the Causal Representation Learning Lab, you will be responsible for:· Developing new machine learning and neural network architectures building on and inspired by causal principles· Causal discovery in complex environments and large-scale visual datasets· Benchmarks and data sets for causal representation learning· Developing evaluation pipelines to test model performance under distribution shifts· Engaging with product and development teams across AWS and Amazon to help bringing your scientific breakthroughs to customers· Contribute to our unique multidisciplinary environment with your own creativity and talentWe at AWS value individual expression, respect different opinions, and work together to create a culture where each of us is able to contribute fully. Our unique backgrounds and perspectives strengthen our ability to achieve Amazon's mission of being Earth's most customer-centric company.
Applied Scientist - Personalization
GB, MLN, Edinburgh
We’re looking for a Machine Learning Scientist in the Personalization team for our Edinburgh office. You will be responsible for developing and disseminating customer-facing personalized recommendation algorithms. This is a hands-on role with global impact working with a team of world-class engineers and scientists across the Edinburgh offices and wider organization.You will design deep learning algorithms that scale to very large quantities of data, and serve high-scale low-latency recommendations to all customers worldwide. You will embody scientific rigor, designing and executing experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. You will work alongside more senior team members to delight customers by aiding in recommendations relevancy, and raise the profile of Amazon as a global leader in machine learning and personalization.Successful candidates will have strong technical ability, focus on customers by applying a customer-first approach, excellent teamwork and communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. Our position offers exceptional opportunities for every candidate to grow their technical and non-technical skills. If you are selected, you have the opportunity to make a difference to our business by designing and building state of the art machine learning systems on big data, leveraging Amazon’s vast computing resources (AWS), working on exciting and challenging projects, and delivering meaningful results to customers world-wide.Key responsibilities· Develop deep learning algorithms for high-scale recommendations problem· Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, making use of both quantitative analysis and business judgement.· Collaborate with software engineering teams to integrate successful experimental results into large-scale, highly complex Amazon production systems capable of handling 100,000s of transactions per second at low latency.· Report results in a manner which is both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant, exemplifying good scientific practice in a business environment.
Applied Scientist
US, NY, New York
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 and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!The Ad Response Prediction team builds innovating click-through rate & conversation rate machine learning models, pipelines, and real-time serving infra to match shoppers’ intent to relevant ads on all devices, for all contexts and in all marketplaces. Through precise estimation of shoppers’ interaction with ads and their long-term value, we aim to drive optimal ads allocation and pricing, and help to deliver a relevant, engaging and delightful ads experience to Amazon shoppers. As the business and the complexity of various new initiatives we take continues to grow, we are looking for talented Applied Scientists to join the team.This team is directly impacting customers in meaningful ways and contributing to billions of dollars in revenue!As an Applied Scientist on this team you will:· Build machine learning models and perform data analysis to deliver scalable solutions to business problems.· Perform hands-on analysis and modeling with enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales without compromising shopper experience.· Work closely with software engineers on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production.· Design and run A/B experiments that affect hundreds of millions of customers, evaluate the impact of your optimizations and communicate your results to various business stakeholders.· Work with scientists and economists to model the interaction between organic sales and sponsored content and to further evolve Amazon's marketplace.· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving.· Research new predictive learning approaches for the sponsored products business.· Write production code to bring models into production.Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products 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, 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.Impact and Career Growth: 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 is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
Research Scientist
RO, Iasi
As an Research Scientist, you will participate in the design, development, and evaluation of models and machine learning (ML) technology to delight our customers. More specifically, as a member of the team, you will be involved in researching state ofthe art Computer Vision (CV) & ML solutions for Amazon devices and cloud services.About the hiring groupYou will join a team building the technology supporting our computer vision/machine learning research and development, that powers our key security alerting and rich notification services that help our customers protect their home. Our goal is to deliver the fastest, most reliable and flexible infrastructure that speeds up creation of smart features for security devices and that makes our customers feel “Always Home”
Applied Scientist - Sensors
US, WA, Seattle
We’ve been hard at work developing a new, fully-electric delivery system – Amazon Scout – designed to get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices. These devices were created by Amazon, are the size of a small cooler, and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace. We developed Amazon Scout at our research and development lab in Seattle, ensuring the devices can safely and efficiently navigate around pets, pedestrians and anything else in their path.The Amazon Scout team shares a passion for innovation using advanced technologies, a love of solving complex challenges, and a desire to impact customers in a meaningful way. We're looking for Scientists who like dealing with ambiguity, solving hard, large scale problems, and working in a startup like environment. To learn more about Amazon Scout, check out our Amazon Day One Blog post here: http://amazon.com/scoutAre you excited by using physics and electronics to help an autonomous robot sense its environment and operate safely? At Amazon Scout we are building a sidewalk-driving delivery robot. The Scout sensors team is tasked with providing the bot with advanced sensing ability ‘eyes and ears’ to generate the right type, quantity, quality and frequency of data to accomplish its mission.As an Applied Scientist specializing in sensors you will:· Lead early stage technical evaluation of different sensor concepts· Design, prototype and characterize novel sensor and systems.· Provide expertise on sensing and sensors capabilities and fundamentals.· Setup protocols and develop resources for evaluating and testing sensors.· Engage with and coordinate external vendors to customize and develop new sensing systems.· Assist in sensor functional integration with Scout hardware team.· Assist the simulation and application software teams in sensor data collection.Inclusive Team CultureHere at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have 12 affinity groups (employee resource groups) with more than 87,000 employees across hundreds of chapters around the world. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which reminds team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.FlexibilityIt isn’t about which hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We offer flexibility and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthWe care about your career growth too. Whether your goals are to explore new technologies, take on bigger opportunities, or get to the next level, we'll help you get there. Our business is growing fast and our people will grow with it.
Satellite GNC Engineer
US, WA, Redmond
Project Kuiper is an initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to underserved communities around the world. This position is part of the Satellite Attitude Determination and Control team. You will design and analyze the control system and algorithms, support development of our flight hardware and software, help integrate the satellite in our labs, participate in flight operations, and see a constellation of satellites flow through the production line in the building next door.A day in the lifeThis is an opportunity to play a significant role early in the design of an entirely new satellite system with challenging performance requirements. The large, integrated constellation brings opportunities for advanced capabilities that need investigation and development. The constellation size also puts emphasis on engineering excellence so our tools and methods, from conceptualization through manufacturing and all phases of test, will be state of the art as will the satellite and supporting infrastructure on the ground.About the hiring groupOur team has lots of experience with various satellite systems and many other flight vehicles. We have bench strength in both our mission and core GNC disciplines. We design, prototype, test, iterate and learn together. Because GNC is central to safe flight, we tend to drive Concepts of Operation and many system level analyses.You will find that Kuiper's mission is compelling, so our program is staffed with some of the top engineers in the industry. Our daily collaboration with other teams on the program brings constant opportunity for discovery, learning, and growth.Job responsibilitiesYou will design and analyze algorithms for estimation, flight control, and precise pointing using linear methods and simulation. Along with that will be plenty of work developing and applying models and simulations, with various levels of fidelity, of the satellite and our constellation. The labs in our building provide for component level environmental testing, functional and performance checkout, subsystem integration, and satellite integration up to Day in the Life testing and mission rehearsal. We are excited to get into space, so you can look forward to seeing your designs launch and fly soon!Export Control Requirement:Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Senior Research Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Are you excited at the prospect of conducting research to improve the employee and manager experience at Amazon? Would you like to see your findings have a real impact on key HR programs and processes? Join the People Analytics, Insights, and Research team that supports three of Amazon’s most exciting businesses: Devices & Services (the innovator behind Alexa, Kindle, and Echo), Global Media and Entertainment (the business that produces TV shows, new gaming technologies, and runs Amazon music), and Advertising (one of the fastest growing businesses at Amazon).We are seeking a Senior Research Scientist with expertise in mixed-methods research, preferably in social science and behavioral research, but are also open to experience in public health, economics, or similar fields. In this role, you will lead and support research efforts within the Recruiting, Talent Management, and Leadership & Development space.You will help set the direction for science and research in the organization. You will be a thought leader on the team, partnering with a diverse set of stakeholders to identify and develop impactful areas for novel research about talent and recruiting outcomes, mechanisms, and programs. You will mentor and provide scientific expertise/peer review to other scientists and analysts on the team.The ideal candidate should have strong problem solving skills, excellent business acumen, as well as an expertise in both qualitative and quantitative methods. This role will need to navigate complex and ambiguous business challenges by asking the right questions, understanding what methodologies to employ, and communicating results to multiple audiences (e.g., technical peers, functional teams, business leaders). Translating business and stakeholder needs into realistic and actionable scientific research will be a regular challenge in this role.Responsibilities include:· Leading scientific direction, providing consult, mentorship, and peer review.· Partnering closely and driving effective collaborations across multi-disciplinary science, analytics, HR, and business teams. Reviewing and scoping research requests, and recommending appropriate scientific methodologies.· Designing, developing, and executing qualitative and quantitative data collection, research, and experimentation. Strong experience with statistical analysis required. Experience with survey development and experimental design (including quasi-experimental) preferred.· Communicating findings and business impact effectively (written and verbally) with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Senior Applied Scientist, Alexa AI
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Interested in Amazon Alexa? We’re building the speech and language solutions behind Amazon products and services. Come join us!As a Senior Applied Scientist in Alexa AI, you will perform the duties of a research scientist and are also expected to be strong at implementing the algorithm. You are expected be an expert in machine learning approaches for conversational language and speech processing. Our mission is to innovate the state-of-the-art core technologies in these areas.Job responsibilities· Research, design, implement, analyze and evaluate novel algorithms for multimodal conversational AI using deep learning· Develop state-of-the-art algorithms, contribute to Amazon's Intellectual Property and publish at top-tier conferences· Collaborate closely with team members on developing algorithms and demonstrating them in systems including prototypes and productsAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Senior Immunoassay Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
We are a team of doers working passionately to apply cutting-edge advances in diagnostics technology to solve real-world problems. As a Senior Immunoassay Scientist, you will work with a unique and gifted team developing exciting medical diagnostic products and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Our team rewards intellectual curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing products to market. Competitive candidates are responsive, flexible, and able to succeed within an open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, startup-like environment. At the cutting edge of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with some of the most talented scientists, engineers, and product managers.Inclusive Team Culture:Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.The Senior Immunoassay Scientist should be an expert in using immunoassays to develop assays leading to commercially viable products. They should have a deep understanding of underlying biochemical processes and components within conventional immunoassay platforms, be someone capable of diving deep into the data (requires in-depth understanding of the lab processes, for example to do root cause analysis of experimental outcome based on the data), and be someone who can work independently.Job responsibilities· Research and develop both existing and new cutting edge immunoassay technologies· Carefully execute laboratory experiments and provide guidance to teams of scientists and engineers through the writing of clear standard operating protocols.· Assist with assay process transfer to production environments and design and execute verification/validation plans· Work with a team of scientists and engineers to communicate experiments and conclusion for review· Work closely with clinical, regulatory and quality stakeholders· Follow literature in the field
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Sign up for our newsletter
Subscribe
Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2021 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates
Follow Us