Social
Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge update
University teams selected to participate in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge will initially focus on two domains: cooking and home improvement. The challenge is the first in conversational AI to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.
Credit: valentinrussanov / Glynis Condon
Conversational AI

Amazon launches new Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge

University teams will compete in building agents that can help customers complete complex tasks, like cooking and home improvement. Deadline for university team applications is April 16.

By Alexa Prize team
March 11, 2021
7 min read
Share

Editor's note: the TaskBot Challenge teams have been selected, you can learn more about them here.

More information on TaskBot Challenge

If you're interested in learning more about the TaskBot Challenge, visit the TaskBot FAQ page on the Alexa Prize website.

Amazon today announced that it is launching a new Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, in which university teams will compete to develop agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. 

It is the first conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.

The application period for the challenge begins on March 17, and extends to April 16, 2021.

The new challenge will be conducted in parallel with the existing Socialbot Grand Challenge 4, in which nine university teams are competing to create socialbots that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes on a range of topics.

Amazon science panel discusses Alexa Prize, TaskBot challenges

At WSDM 2021, seven Amazon scientists gathered for a roundtable event where Amazon Scholar Eugene Agichtein talked about the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge and introduced the newly announced Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge. Watch the panel talk about the research challenges in voice services and more.

“Customers worldwide interact with Alexa billions of times each week,” said Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president, Natural Understanding. “Those interactions are goal-directed, such as ‘Alexa, what’s the weather forecast for tomorrow?’ or ‘Alexa, did the Lakers win last night?’. But increasingly customers want to go beyond these exchanges, to more complex, multimodal, multi-step tasks. Just as the existing Alexa Prize Grand Challenge is focused on advancing digital assistants’ ability to conduct multi-turn, open domain conversations, this new challenge will focus on what’s required of digital assistants to competently complete multi-step tasks for customers.”

“This new Alexa Prize challenge represents a major step towards Alexa becoming the best digital assistant, by interactively assisting customers to complete everyday tasks, be it in cooking or home improvement,” said Yoelle Maarek, vice president of research and science, Alexa Shopping. “This is a hard AI challenge and we need to rally the best scientific minds if we want to be successful. I am delighted to see that our scientists and scholars at Amazon are turning once more to the academic community to jointly address it. This is a wonderful example of our customer-obsessed science approach where we push the boundaries of science to help and delight our customers together with academia.”

Eugene Agichtein and Emory University 2018 Alexa Prize team
Eugene Agichtein (far right), a computer science professor at Emory University, and an Amazon Scholar, was a faculty advisor for Emory's Alexa Prize team the first two years of the competition. Here, he's shown with the 2018 team. In his role as Amazon Scholar, Agichtein and colleagues have helped develop the new TaskBot Challenge.
Credit: Ann Watson

The goal of the new TaskBot Challenge is to help advance the science of conversational AI, but in ways that differentiate it from the existing Socialbot Challenge, says Eugene Agichtein, a computer science professor at Emory University, and an Amazon Scholar. Agichtein, who joined Amazon as a scholar in 2019, is very familiar with the Alexa Prize competition; he was the faculty advisor for Emory’s Alexa Prize team the first two years of the competition.  The team from Emory won the most recent Alexa Prize socialbot challenge.

“The goal of the socialbot challenge is ambitious and exciting from a scientific perspective,” Agichtein said. “But the focus hasn’t been on how helpful the socialbot can be in actually assisting people. We wanted to design a new challenge that was not only interesting from a science perspective, but also helps customers complete tasks, or solve problems.”

TaskBot Challenge

The idea for the new challenge emerged last year, and aligns with a goal for Alexa to create next-generation conversational AI shopping experiences by engaging customers in pre- and post-purchase dialogues. The TaskBot Challenge will run for three years, and initially teams will focus on two domains: cooking and home improvement.  The challenge incorporates multimodal customer experiences, so in addition to receiving verbal instructions, customers with Echo screen devices, such as the new Echo Show 10, could also be presented with step-by-step instructions, images, or diagrams that enhance task guidance.

For example, a customer might ask Alexa how to fix a scratch on a car. The TaskBot will then ask the customer more questions about their task, and then interactively provide step-by-step instructions and explanations for each step, or potentially adjust its plan based on customer input. 

After the interaction ends, the customer will be asked to rate how helpful that TaskBot was with the task, and will have the option to provide freeform feedback to help the teams improve their TaskBot.

Alexa Prize TaskBot DIY project example
In the forthcoming Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, a customer might ask Alexa how to fix a scratch on a car. The interaction above is an example of how a multi-turn, multi-step conversation might occur. After the interaction ends, the customer will be asked to rate how helpful that TaskBot was with the task, and will have the option to provide freeform feedback to help teams improve their TaskBot.
Credit: Glynis Condon

Success in the challenge will require participants to advance the state of the art in conversational AI, and address difficult science challenges related to knowledge representation and inference, commonsense and causal reasoning, and language understanding and generation, among others — requiring synthesis of multiple areas and approaches in AI.

“In developing the TaskBot Challenge, we tried to set a goal that is scientifically ambitious and novel, yet potentially achievable within a three-year time horizon,” Agichtein explained.  “For example, the participants will have to integrate into the interaction the domain knowledge from structured and unstructured sources, such as databases of recipes and ingredients, with commonsense and causal reasoning to understand if a step in a recipe is not possible. Interacting with millions of customers attempting to accomplish tasks in the messy real world will be humbling, challenging, and yet inspiring experience for university students.”

Interacting with millions of customers attempting to accomplish tasks in the messy real world will be humbling, challenging, and yet inspiring experience for university students.
Eugene Agichtein

Another scientific challenge will be how the participating teams guide a customer through complex, multi-step plans that may need to be revised if, for instance, the customer needs to substitute an ingredient, or doesn’t have a tool required to complete the task. 

“That’s where things get really challenging” Agichtein said. “The TaskBot must first develop a plan — baking a cake, for instance — and then lead the customer through the baking process. The TaskBots will have to understand when customers are getting into trouble, say, if they have run out of flour. The TaskBots will then have to suggest solutions to such problems and adjust the plan as necessary.”

In year one of the competition, Agichtein expects teams to focus primarily on single-session tasks, but teams have to be prepared to maintain and resume tasks over multiple sessions, perhaps extending across multiple days. 

“In year one, we won’t expect the TaskBots to successfully handle very complex tasks, especially those that span multiple sessions, but it’s a goal we’ll want teams to eventually address over the course of the challenge,” he said.

Other challenges the teams will confront is what tasks to try to help with, and what tasks are inappropriate or dangerous, and have to be declined. 

The deadline for university teams to apply for the challenge is April 16, 2021. Up to ten teams will be selected to participate in the challenge by June 11, and the competition will begin on June 14.  The year-long competition will conclude in May 2022, with winners being announced the following month.
Teams selected for the challenge receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing services to support their research and development efforts, access to the TaskBot Toolkit, as well as other resources data, and Alexa team support. The winning team receives a $500,000 prize, and the second- and third-place teams receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively.

Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge

The Alexa Prize first launched in 2016 as a competition for university students dedicated to advancing the field of conversational AI. Teams are challenged to design socialbots that Alexa customers can interact with via Alexa-enabled devices. The student teams’ ultimate goal is to meet the Grand Challenge: earn a composite score of 4.0 or higher (out of 5) from the judges, and have the judges find that at least two-thirds of their conversations with the socialbot in the final round of judging remain coherent and engaging for 20 minutes.

The teams selected for the challenge receive a $250,000 research grant, Alexa-enabled devices, free Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing services to support their research and development efforts, access to the Cobot (conversational bot) toolkit and other tools, data, and Alexa team support.

In previous challenges, participating teams have improved the state of the art for open domain dialogue systems by developing improved natural language understanding (NLU) systems, neural response generation models, common sense knowledge modeling, and dialogue policies leading to smoother, and more engaging conversations. Alexa Prize also has led to innovative solutions that are now incorporated into existing customer experiences, such as an explicit content filter and neural response generator.

A team from the University of Washington won the inaugural competition. In 2018, a team from the University of California, Davis won the challenge, and the team from Emory University won last year.  Research papers are published each year by the participating teams, and by the Amazon Alexa Prize team.  The papers are accessible from the Alexa Prize website.

Nine university teams from around the globe are currently participating in Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. The challenge began last November and will conclude in August 2021. The winning team receives a $500,000 prize, and the second- and third-place team receive prizes of $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. The grand challenge, a $1 million research grant, will be awarded to the winning team’s university if it attains a composite score of 4.0 or higher, on a 5-point scale, and at least two-thirds of their socialbot’s conversations with interactors last for 20 minutes.

Customers can engage with one of the existing competitions’ socialbots simply by saying, “Alexa, let’s chat".

Research areas
Tags
About the Author
Alexa Prize team

Latest news

The latest updates, stories, and more about Alexa Prize.
Load more

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon Robotics is seeking an exceptional Applied Scientist to join our Foundation Models and Agentic AI team. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of large vision-language-action (VLA) models, reasoning and task planning models, and reinforcement learning. At Amazon Robotics, we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. We are pioneering the development of robotics foundation models that: - Enable unprecedented generalization across diverse tasks - Integrate multi-modal learning capabilities (visual, depth, force, tactile, linguistic) - Accelerate policy skill acquisition through imitation learning and reinforcement learning - Enhance robotic perception and environmental understanding - Streamline development processes through reusable capabilities The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Applied AI and Robotics Foundations Model team, you will: - Model Development and Training: Designing and implementing the model architectures, training and fine tuning the foundation models using various datasets, and optimize the model performance through iterative experiments - Data Management: Process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines. - Experimentation and Validation: Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance. - Code Development: Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Research: Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Collaboration: Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies. A day in the life Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: - Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage - Maternity and Parental Leave Options - Paid Time Off (PTO) - 401(k) Plan If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart, collaborative team of enthusiastic doers that work passionately to apply innovative advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even image yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun.
Senior Research Scientist, RBS Tech
IN, KA, Bengaluru
RBS (Retail Business Services) Tech team works towards enhancing the customer experience (CX) and their trust in product data by providing technologies to find and fix Amazon CX defects at scale. Our platforms help in improving the CX in all phases of customer journey, including selection, discoverability & fulfilment, buying experience and post-buying experience (product quality and customer returns). The team also develops GenAI platforms for automation of Amazon Stores Operations. As a Sciences team in RBS Tech, we focus on foundational ML research and develop scalable state-of-the-art ML solutions to solve the problems covering customer experience (CX) and Selling partner experience (SPX). We work to solve problems related to multi-modal understanding (text and images), task automation through multi-modal LLM Agents, supervised and unsupervised techniques, multi-task learning, multi-label classification, aspect and topic extraction for Customer Anecdote Mining, image and text similarity and retrieval using NLP and Computer Vision for product groupings and identifying duplicate listings in product search results Key job responsibilities As a Senior Research Scientist, you will be responsible to design and deploy scalable GenAI, NLP and Computer Vision solutions that will impact the content visible to millions of customer and solve key customer experience issues. You will develop novel LLM, deep learning and statistical techniques for task automation, text processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and anomaly detection problems. You will define the research and experiments strategy with an iterative execution approach to develop AI/ML models and progressively improve the results over time. You will partner with business and engineering teams to identify and solve large and significantly complex problems that require scientific innovation. You will help the team leverage your expertise, by coaching and mentoring. You will contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and the engineering practices. You will independently as well as guide team to file for patents and/or publish research work where opportunities arise. The RBS org deals with problems that are directly related to the selling partners and end customers and the ML team drives resolution to organization level problems. Therefore, the Senior Research Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
Sr Applied Scientist, Amazon Shipping
IN, HR, Gurugram
Lead ML teams building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. As an Sr Applied Scientist, you will set scientific direction, mentor applied scientists, and partner with engineering and product leaders to deliver production-grade ML solutions at massive scale. Key job responsibilities 1. Lead and grow a high-performing team of Applied Scientists, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and career development. 2. Define and own the scientific vision and roadmap for ML solutions powering large-scale transportation planning and execution. 3. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 4. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 5. Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 6. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing. A day in the life Your day includes reviewing model performance and business metrics, guiding technical design and experimentation, mentoring scientists, and driving roadmap execution. You’ll balance near-term delivery with long-term innovation while ensuring solutions are robust, interpretable, and scalable. Ultimately, your work helps improve delivery reliability, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience at massive scale.
Applied Scientist, North America Sort Centers, Amazon Transportation Services, North America Sort Centers, Amazon Transportation Services
US, WA, Bellevue
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? Have you also wondered what are different ways that the transportation assets can be used to delight the customer even more. If so, the Amazon transportation Services, North America Sort Center Science team is for you . We manage the delivery of tens of millions of products every week to Amazon’s customers, achieving on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner. We are looking for an enthusiastic, customer obsessed Applied Scientist with strong scientific thinking, good software and statistics experience, skills to help manage projects and operations, improve metrics, and develop scalable processes and tools. The primary role of an Applied Scientist within Amazon is to address business challenges through building a compelling case, and using data to influence change across the organization. This individual will be given responsibility on their first day to own those business challenges and the autonomy to think strategically and make data driven decisions. Decisions and tools made in this role will have significant impact to the customer experience, as it will have a major impact on how we operate the middle mile network. Ideal candidates will be a high potential, strategic and analytic graduate with a PhD in (Operations Research, Statistics, Engineering, and Supply Chain) ready for challenging opportunities in the core of our world class operations space. Great candidates have a history of operations research, machine learning , and the ability to use data and research to make changes. This role requires robust skills in research and implementation of scalable products and models . This individual will need to be able to work with a team, but also be comfortable making decisions independently, in what is often times an ambiguous environment. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities - Design and develop advanced mathematical optimization and machine learning solutions in the domains of network design and optimization. - Research, prototype, simulate, and experiment with these models using programming languages such as Java and Python; participate in the production level deployment. - Create, enhance, and maintain technical documentation and science designs. - Present to other Scientists, Product, and Software Engineering teams, as well as Stakeholders. - Lead project plans from a scientific perspective by managing product features, technical risks, milestones and launch plans.
Principal Applied Scientist, QEC SW, MQS Center for Quantum Computing
US, CA, San Francisco
The Models, Quantum, and Silicon (MQS) Center for Quantum Computing (CQC) is a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, on a mission to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer. We are looking to hire a Principal Applied Scientist to join our growing Software team. You’ll work closely with our partners on the control hardware development and quantum error correction theory teams to build a quantum control system capable of supporting the next generation of fault-tolerant workloads This requires someone who (1) has a strong desire to work within a team of scientists and engineers, and (2) demonstrates ownership in initiating and driving projects to completion. Inclusive Team Culture Here at Amazon, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Export Control Requirement Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be either 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, or be able to obtain a US export license. If you are unsure if you meet these requirements, please apply and Amazon will review your application for eligibility. Key job responsibilities - Contribute to the software/gateware runtime for our next-generation quantum control system - Build emulation tooling to enable exploring the requirements space of control systems for real-time quantum error detection and correction - Make opinionated decisions about engineering tradeoffs to inform our control hardware/software roadmap - Demonstrate thought leadership in FTQC by releasing open-source software and publishing research - Empower other scientists to actively contribute to the codebase through mentorship and documentation We are looking for candidates with strong engineering principles, a bias for action, superior problem-solving, and excellent communication skills. Working effectively within a team environment is essential. A day in the life The majority of your time will be spent on projects that extend the functional capabilities or performance of our internal control stack. This requires working backwards from the needs of our science staff in the context of our larger experimental roadmap. You will translate science and software requirements into design proposals balancing implementation complexity against time-to-delivery. Once a design proposal has been reviewed and accepted, you’ll drive implementation and coordinate with internal stakeholders to ensure a smooth roll out. Because many high-level experimental goals have cross-cutting requirements, you’ll often work closely with other engineers or scientists or on the team. About the team You will be joining the Software group within the MQS Center of Quantum Computing. Our team is comprised of scientists and software engineers who are building scalable software that enables quantum computing technologies.
Research Scientist, Pricing Science
US, WA, Seattle
Pricing is one of the most consequential decisions Amazon makes, and the science behind it needs to be causally rigorous, not just predictive. The P2 Optimization Science team builds the machine learning (ML) systems that power Amazon's pricing decisions at scale: demand lift models, customer lifetime value (LTV) frameworks, and the experimentation infrastructure that validates whether pricing changes actually work. We're looking for a Research Scientist to own causal inference at the intersection of ML and pricing experimentation. Our team has identified a real gap: the methodological bridge between econometric analysis and production-scale ML pipelines needs a practitioner who lives in both worlds. You'll build conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation models, design analysis workflows for pricing experiments, and develop reusable causal ML infrastructure that the broader team — including non-ML scientists — can rely on. If you're a scientist who wants to tackle hard causal identification problems in a high-stakes production environment, and who finds satisfaction in making rigorous methods accessible to a broader team, this role is for you. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, evaluate, and deploy end-to-end causal ML pipelines for pricing use cases, including CATE estimation models and heterogeneous treatment effect frameworks. - Serve as the team's causal ML methodology expert — defining identification strategies, model selection criteria, evaluation standards, and the tradeoffs between econometric and ML approaches to causal estimation. - Contribute causal analysis methodology to pricing A/B test post-analysis and build reusable tooling that economists and other non-ML scientists can adopt without requiring deep ML expertise. - Assess emerging causal inference methods (e.g., synthetic difference-in-differences, generalized random forests, causal representation learning) for applicability to Amazon's pricing context, and author internal methodology proposals for adoption. - Partner with senior economists on identification strategy and causal assumptions, collaborate with software and data engineering partners on production deployment, and align with product managers on experiment design requirements. A day in the life Your work directly shapes the prices customers see on hundreds of millions of Amazon products. In a given week you might investigate an optimization anomaly in simulation and trace it to an unmodeled market dynamic, then design an offline evaluation framework to benchmark competing approaches before committing to online testing. You'll collaborate with senior economists on identification strategy for a pricing experiment, present a science proposal for incorporating a new competitiveness signal into an optimization system, or work with the experimentation platform team on randomization design. You'll also have opportunities to write up novel scientific findings for submission to venues such as KDD, NeurIPS, or the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. About the team The P2 Optimization Science team sits at the center of Amazon's pricing decisions. We build the ML systems, causal inference pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure that determine how prices are set across Amazon's global catalog. Our team brings together research scientists, economists, and engineers who collaborate closely to turn rigorous methodology into production-quality systems with measurable business impact. We value scientific rigor, clear communication across disciplines, and a culture where every team member's work is designed to be extensible and useful beyond their own project. If you want your science to directly influence how hundreds of millions of customers experience Amazon, this is the team to join.
Principal Applied Scientist, Ads Measurement Science
US, NY, New York
The Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) organization of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of their ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. This Principal Applied Scientist leads the technical vision and execution for Amazon Advertising's performance measurement. Our measurement products and tools help customers understand the holistic impact of their spend on Amazon Ads and optimize their portfolios. This is a complex, multi-disciplinary scientific space spanning machine learning, causal inference, statistics and experimentation, natural language processing, and generative AI. As a GenAI-first organization, we build foundational and agentic models that power advertiser use cases across Ads, while empowering our Applied Scientists to directly build and ship products. You will guide a team of scientists with expertise across different domains to come together and innovate on some of the hardest problems in advertising, made more challenging by evolving privacy regulations and technological changes. In measuring the comprehensive impact of advertising, key challenges you will tackle include capturing impact: 1) both for identified and increasingly unidentified web traffic in light of an evolving global privacy landscape; 2) for outcomes across retailers, including both within and beyond Amazon; and 3) for both short- and long-term impacts of advertising. Key job responsibilities * Driving the scientific vision of the teams in your organization and you advise and influence its technical leadership on performance measurement models and products. * Identifying, tackling, and proposing innovative solutions to intrinsically hard, previously unsolved problems. You solve problems pragmatically, applying judgment and experience to balance trade-offs between competing interests. * Bringing clarity to complex problems, probing assumptions, illuminating pitfalls, fostering shared understanding, and guiding towards effective solutions. * Serving and being recognized by internal and external peers as a thought leader in modeled measurement in Ads. You will engage routinely with the broader scientific community, e.g. as a reviewer, program committee member, workshop organizer, or chair at peer-reviewed internal/external conferences. * Leading by example, with your papers, analyses, and code setting the standard in your organization for scientific engineering excellence. * Leading science and design reviews, aligning teams across your organization around coherent algorithmic strategies. * Influencing your team’s science and business strategy by driving one or more team roadmaps contributing to the organization’s roadmap and taking responsibility for some organizational goals. You drive multiple new product features from inception to production launch. * Guiding the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger applied science community on trends, technologies, and best practices. You drive the documentation of scientific innovation. You attract bar-raising talent from academia and industry. * Staying abreast of academic and industry trends, knowing the state of the art, and building on top of existing solutions instead of reinventing when possible. About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Robotics Applied Scientist
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building robotic systems that combine frontier AI, sophisticated control, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is an opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to develop tactile- and force-driven manipulation policies for highly dexterous, multi-fingered robotic hands and grippers. In this role you will research and build policy learning algorithms that enable robotic hands to perform grasping and in-hand manipulation in unstructured, real-world environments, using touch and force feedback as first-class signals rather than afterthoughts. Much of this work is grounded in reinforcement learning. To be successful you need to be highly motivated, dive deep, and deliver to the highest standards. You will demonstrate strong working knowledge of modern policy learning methods, with expertise in taking algorithms from simulation onto real hardware. That means being comfortable working against real physical constraints and treating sim-to-real as a core research problem rather than optimizing for benchmark numbers alone. You will work across tactile signal processing, contact-rich manipulation, sim-to-real transfer, and multi-modal sensor fusion to build robust solutions for autonomous grasping, dexterous re-orientation, and fine motor control. You will bring the desire to learn from new challenges, and the problem-solving and communication skills to work within a highly interactive and experienced team. Key job responsibilities - Design and train manipulation policies that leverage tactile and force feedback for dexterous grasping, in-hand manipulation, and contact-rich tasks, using reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or hybrid approaches. - Drive sim-to-real transfer, closing the gap between simulated and physical performance on real robotic hands. - Shape objectives and control strategies with the hardware in mind, accounting for how motors and actuators actually behave: transmission ratios, torque versus power, backdrivability, and thermal limits. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks, with benchmarks and metrics that make tactile perception and policy performance systematically comparable across iterations. - Own scientific and technical projects within the tactile sensing and manipulation workstreams, driving from research concept through deployment on physical robotic systems — and, at the senior level, set direction across a workstream. - Collaborate with hardware, mechanical design, firmware, and controls teams — and with partner applied science organizations — to translate research advances into deployable robotic capabilities, and to inform sensor and actuator design decisions with policy-level requirements. - Publish at top-tier venues and build collaborations with the external research community. - Contribute to a strong scientific bar on the team through code and design review, and mentor engineers and interns working on real-world manipulation and sensing problems. A day in the life Your morning might start with a standup alongside hardware and controls engineers reviewing overnight sim-to-real training runs on a multi-finger gripper, debugging why a grasp policy that worked in simulation is slipping on a real sensor array. Mid-morning you join the weekly tactile sensing workstream to align on sensor integration milestones and share early results from a contact-state estimator you have been prototyping. After lunch you spend a focused block iterating on a reinforcement learning reward formulation, testing variations in simulation before queuing runs on the cluster. Later you pair with a mechanical engineer to review sensor placement trade-offs on an upcoming gripper revision, then wrap the day by drafting a short experiment write-up and sketching next steps for a conference submission. No two days look exactly the same: one week you may be collecting teleoperated demonstrations on the physical robot to seed an imitation learning pipeline; the next you could be deep in a codebase refactor to support a new tactile modality. Throughout, you balance hands-on research — writing algorithms, running experiments, analyzing data — with cross-team collaboration and mentoring. The common thread is moving from research insight to working capability on real hardware, with a tight feedback loop between simulation and the physical world. About the team Our is developing next-generation manipulation capabilities for highly dexterous multi-fingered grippers and hands. Our work spans tactile sensor development, manipulation policy learning, and the tight integration of sensing hardware with intelligent control software. We are building systems that can feel, adapt, and manipulate with human-level dexterity. You will join a team working at the frontier of tactile sensing and contact-rich manipulation, helping define how robots perceive and interact with objects through touch. Because we build the hands as well as the policies that drive them, you will have a direct line to the sensor, actuator, and mechanism designs your algorithms depend on — and real influence over how they evolve. This is an opportunity to solve hard problems across perception, learning, and physical interaction alongside a team of scientists and engineers building toward real-world deployment.
Data Scientist, OTS - Data ANCHOR Team
US, TX, Austin
The OTS ANCHOR (Analytics, Insights, and Centralized Hub for OTS Reporting) team is part of the WW IT Operations & RME organization, responsible for delivering data solutions that drive operational excellence across Amazon's global IT infrastructure. We build data pipelines, predictive models, develop analytical intelligence frameworks, and create AI-powered solutions that transform how Amazon manages, triages, and resolves IT operational incidents at scale pointing towards the Letting Data Tell the Story north start vision. We are seeking a Data Scientist to help own the end-to-end data science charter for critical operational workstreams — from forecasting IT service demand and capacity planning to designing intelligent severity triaging models and building the analytical backbone for agentic AI solutions. You will work backwards from complex operational problems to create models and solutions that directly impact the efficiency and reliability of Amazon's IT operations worldwide. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models for IT operations forecasting, including incident volume prediction, capacity planning, and workforce demand modeling - Build and maintain severity classification and intelligent triaging models that process thousands of daily IT service tickets across global regions - Develop anomaly detection systems to identify emerging patterns in operational data, supporting proactive incident prevention - Apply econometric and statistical methods to measure the impact of operational interventions and inform resource allocation decisions - Partner with engineering teams to productionize ML models via automated pipelines using AWS services (SageMaker, Step Functions, Lambda, Redshift) - Design and conduct experiments to empirically validate model performance and operational impact - Contribute to data quality monitoring frameworks and help maintain standards for operational data integrity - Collaborate with cross-functional teams (ServiceNow platform, Decision Intelligence, Field Operations) to translate analytical insights into actionable recommendations - Communicate findings, model performance, and recommendations to stakeholders and senior leaders through written documents and presentations - Contribute to the team's science roadmap, identifying opportunities to apply ML/AI (including Generative AI) to operational challenges A day in the life Amazon Benefits: Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan
2027 Applied Science Internship - Robotics - United States
US, MA, North Reading
Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op (2027) Are you passionate about robotics and research? Do you want to solve real customer problems through innovative technology? Do you enjoy working on scalable research and projects in a collaborative team environment? Do you want to see your science solutions directly impact millions of customers worldwide? We’re looking for current PhD students with a passion for robotic research and applications to join us in 2027 as Robotics Applied Scientist II Interns/Co-ops to shape the future of robotics and transform automation at Amazon’s scale. By applying to this role, you will be considered for Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op (2027) opportunities across various Robotics teams at Amazon with different robotics research focus. Internship positions are available for multiple locations, durations (3 to 6+ months), and year-round start dates (winter, spring, summer, fall). Join us at the forefront of Applied Science, where your contributions will shape the future of Robotics! Key job responsibilities As a Robotics Applied Scientist II Intern/Co-op, you will work alongside global experts to advance the state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence, tackling innovative problems that bridge the gap between research and real-world robotics implementation to innovate and build solutions on behalf of our customers. We are particularly interested in students with specialization and expertise in one or more of the following research areas: - Robotics - Artificial Intelligence - Robotics Manipulation (e.g., robot arm, grasping, dexterous manipulation, end of arm tools/end effector) - Autonomous Mobile Robots - Mobile Manipulation - Multi-Robot Coordination - Autonomous Navigation - Locomotion - Motion/Path Planning - Controls - Perception - Sensing - Robot Learning - Machine Learning - Computer Vision - Large Language Models (LLM), Vision-Language-Action Models (VLA), Vision-Language-Models (VLM) - World Models - Human-Robot Interaction - Robotics Simulation - Optimization - And related! Key responsibilities may include: - Develop novel, scalable algorithms and/or modeling techniques that advance the state-of-the-art in science areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, or related - Tackle challenging, innovative research problems within robotics, artificial intelligence, or related that bridge the gap between theoretical advancement and practical robotics implementation - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to solve complex problems, and to communicate research findings clearly, leveraging your expertise in robotics, artificial intelligence, or related - Demonstrate the ability to work independently, thrive in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment - Leverage AI-powered tools where applicable to accelerate research, experimentation, and prototyping. - Critically review and validate outputs from AI tools and automated systems. About the team Explore Robotics Teams at Amazon At Amazon, robotics is where innovative research meets real-world deployment. There are many different specialized robotics teams, including the few highlighted below. Learn more about Robotics at Amazon here: https://www.amazon.science/research-areas/robotics Fulfillment Technologies and Robotics We build dynamic partnerships between people and intelligent machines. This intricate collaboration helps Amazon fulfill orders with unmatched accuracy. Working in symphony with our robotic technology, you’ll have the opportunity to extend your technical capabilities by working alongside some of the industry’s most advanced technologies. This includes our fleet of autonomous mobile robots, sophisticated control software, and technologies like language perception, machine learning, object recognition, and semantic understanding of commands. These technologies help us deliver an ever-improving customer and employee experience, as well as improve the safety of our facilities. Amazon Robotics Amazon Robotics is at the epicenter of robotics innovation. We design, test, and build mobile robots and mechatronic systems. Our offices, labs, test floors, and factories are close together, which means we can design the hardware, write the code, test, build, and watch it all come to life. Our areas of focus include advancements in autonomous mobility, AI, robotic management software, and much more. Fauna Fauna is focused on building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Fauna’s goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with everyday. Fauna develops tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Fauna’s work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but overall experience. Amazon Fulfillment Technologies Amazon Fulfillment Technologies develops tech solutions that create network optimizations for all Amazon sites worldwide. We own network infrastructure and devices in all buildings and labor planning and scheduling technology for fulfillment centers in North America and Europe.
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social