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SimBot Challenge FAQs

Frequently asked questions about the challenge.
General
General
What is the Alexa Prize?
Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on over 100 million devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. With Alexa, you can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day. Our collection of tools, APIs, reference solutions, and documentation makes it easy for anyone to build with Alexa.
Why did Amazon create the Alexa Prize?
The Alexa Prize, an annual university competition dedicated to accelerating the field of conversational artificial intelligence (AI), was created to recognize students from around the globe who are changing the way we interact with technology. The goal is to advance several areas of conversational AI including natural language understanding (NLU), context modeling, dialog management, commonsense reasoning, natural language generation (NLG), and knowledge acquisition.
How does the Alexa Prize support research?
The Alexa Prize is a research testbed for university students to experiment with and advance conversational AI at scale.

Research teams own the intellectual property (IP) in their systems and are encouraged to publish scientific articles on their work. As described in the Official Rules, participating teams grant Amazon a non-exclusive license to any technology or software they develop in connection with the competition.
What new datasets will I have access to as part of the Alexa Prize?
The TEACh dataset as well as a training dataset proprietary to the live interaction portion of the SimBot Challenge will be available to competitors in each phase.
SimBot
What is the SimBot Challenge?
SimBot, a competition focused on helping advance development of next-generation virtual assistants that will assist humans in completing real-world tasks by continuously learning, and gaining the ability to perform commonsense reasoning.

The SimBot Challenge will have two phases: A public benchmark phase, and a live interactions phase. Participants in both phases will build machine-learning models for natural language understanding, human-robot interaction, and robotic task completion. Artificial intelligence challenges addressed in the competition relate to reasoning on language and scene understanding, learning from demonstration, self-learning, and task completion utilizing natural language.

Unlike previous Alexa Prize competitions, the public benchmark challenge phase will be open to university teams, as well as individuals in academia and industry interested in advancing the science of AI and engaging top researchers from around the globe. The SimBot Challenge public benchmark phase is like existing visual language navigation competitions.
What is the difference between the Public Benchmark Challenge and the Live Interaction Challenge?
The Public Benchmark Challenge is open to any individual or team, academic or industry, who wants to complete and submit a model for evaluation and rating during the evaluation period. It is based on the TEACh dataset offered to the research community in October, 2021. The Live Interaction Period’s participation is limited solely to the university-based teams selected for the SimBot Challenge in November 2021 and June, 2022. These teams will each receive Amazon sponsorship to build a SimBot that will compete in a challenge from July, 2022 to September 2022 where they will receive real time ratings and feedback from Alexa Users.
Why is the SimBot - Live Interaction Challenge only limited to university teams?
The SimBot Challenge - live interaction phase is part of the Alexa Prize which is currently limited to universities and university students in Amazon initiatives to advance AI. However, the Public Benchmarking Challenge is open to both academic and university-based teams.
What will my SimBot do?
SimBot will navigate in a virtual environment to complete challenges guided by Alexa users. SimBot will interact with objects in the environment including but not limited to those common to offices and homes. There will be obstacles and hazards introduced to make game play fun and challenging.
How will I build my SimBot?
SimBots will use images from the game and instructions from Alexa users to navigate in a virtual world. Teams will build AI models which recognize objects and scenes as well as understand natural language commands from users. We plan to provide baseline data and a baseline model as a reference but we expect teams to develop new and novel approaches as well as augment the provided data to improve performance.
Eligibility: Public Benchmark Challenge
Phase 1, SimBot challenge
Who is eligible to participate in the public benchmark challenge?
Any individual or team, academic or industry-based.
How do I sign up to participate in the public benchmark challenge?
A registration form will open on November 15, 2021 at alexaprize.com.
Is funding available to university teams competing in the public benchmark challenge?
No, funding is only available to university teams selected to participate in the SimBot Challenge. In addition to the teams selected in 2021 up to four new, high-performing teams from the public benchmark challenge will be invited to apply for the SimBot challenge, live interaction phase for which funding is available. Learn more here.
Who can apply to participate?
Any individual or team can register and participate in the public benchmark phase with exception of parties from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and the region of Crimea.

Registration for the public benchmark challenge will open November 15, 2021. The challenge will begin on January 10, 2022.
Do I need to be a certain age?
Participants must be at or above the age of majority in the country, state, province or jurisdiction of residence at the time of registration.
Can I enroll if a family member is an Amazon employee?
Immediate family members and household members of Amazon employees, directors and contractors are not eligible to participate.
Eligibility: SimBot Challenge
Includes sponsored teams for both Public Benchmark and Live Interaction phases
Who can apply to participate?
The Alexa Prize is open to full-time students enrolled in an accredited university, with the exception of universities in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and the region of Crimea (see Official Rules). Proof of enrollment will be required to participate.
Can I participate if I don’t attend a university?
No. The Alexa Prize is open only to full-time enrolled university students.
Do I need to be enrolled in a university program throughout the duration of the competition?
All participating team members must remain full-time students in good standing at their university while participating in the competition.
Do I need to be a certain age?
Participants must be at or above the age of majority in the country, state, province or jurisdiction of residence at the time of entry.
Can I enroll if a family member is an Amazon employee?
Immediate family members and household members of Amazon employees, directors and contractors are not eligible to participate. See Official Rules for additional restrictions.
If my team fails to apply for the SimBot Challenge now, will there be any future opportunities to compete in the Live Interaction challenge?
Yes, the initial application period run from October 4-31, 2021. In addition to the teams selected in 2021 up to four new, high-performing university teams from the public benchmark challenge will be invited to apply for the SimBot challenge, live interaction phase for which funding is available. Learn more here.
Will university teams selected post-Public Benchmark Challenge be eligible for funding and for what amount?
Teams selected for the SimBot Challenge in June, 2022 will be eligible for funding.
If my team was not selected during the first application period are we eligible to re-apply in may if we qualify?
Yes. University-based teams that participate in the public benchmark phase are eligible to re-apply for the SimBot challenge between May 9 - 23, 2022. Four new, high-performing university teams from the public benchmark challenge will be invited to apply for the SimBot challenge, live interaction phase for which funding is available. Learn more here.
My team is not completely comprised of university students but we perform well in the public benchmark challenge? Is there an opportunity for us to continue in the competition?
Yes, we plan to continue the public benchmark competition through the end of 2022.
My company does collaborative work with several universities, are we eligible to compete in the live interaction challenge alongside them?
No, only full-time students are eligible to participate in the SimBot challenge, which includes the live interaction period.
My university and another frequently collaborate on projects - is there any exception to the students all enrolled in one university rule?
Applications are limited to students all from the same, single, university.
Teams
How many teams will be selected to participate?
All applications will be reviewed and evaluated by a panel of Amazon experts. Up to ten teams will be selected and sponsored by Amazon. All teams selected in November, 2021 will receive a $250,000 grant while those selected in June, 2022 will receive a $200,000 grant intended to support two full-time students, a month of faculty time, free Alexa devices, and free AWS hosting including access to CPU and GPU based machines, SQL and NoSQL databases, and object storage. See the Official Rules for details.
How many team members can our team have?
There are no minimum or maximum team member requirements. All team members must be enrolled in their university throughout the duration of the competition. All teams will receive a $250,000 grant if selected in November 2021 or a $200,000 grant if selected in June, 2022 regardless of how many members are on the team. We recommend a team with 4-6 students with diverse fields of study or areas of expertise.
Can students from different universities be on the same team?
Teams must be comprised of students attending the same university.
Can one university have more than one team?
Yes, universities may have more than one team.
Can I participate on two separate teams?
You can only be a part of one team for the duration of the competition.
Can undergraduate and graduate students work together?
Yes, teams may be comprised of undergraduate and graduate students.
Do I need a faculty advisor?
All teams must nominate a faculty advisor and include the faculty advisor’s consent in the applications.
What is the role of the faculty advisor?
Faculty advisors will advise students on technical directions and be a sounding board for new ideas, similar to a graduate school advisor. They will also act as the official representative from the university for this competition.
Can we add or remove team members during the competition?
During the competition, faculty advisors may request to remove or add members to the team, subject to approval by Amazon.
Can we discuss our SimBot with faculty or students who aren’t on our team?
Only team members may work on their SimBot. However, the faculty advisor and other students and faculty members at your university may provide support and advice to your team and may co-author technical publications and research papers.
Application process
How do we apply?
Check the SimBot page for the latest update on applications.
What do we need to apply?
Once you have selected your team members, team leader, and faculty sponsor, you are ready to begin the application process.
Do all team members have to apply?
Each team must have a team lead, who should apply on behalf of the whole team. Your application must include all of your team members’ information.
Is there an application fee?
There is no application fee.
How will teams be selected to participate?
All applications will be reviewed by a panel of Amazon employees. Teams will be selected based on the following criteria: (1) the potential scientific contribution to the field; (2) the technical merit of the approach; (3) the novelty of the idea; and (4) an assessment of the team’s ability to execute against their plan. Please be sure to provide enough detail in your application to enable our experts to evaluate your proposal.
Competition details
What is the goal of the challenge?
To develop AI models which advance the state of the art and allow users to naturally interact with a robotic assistant in a virtual world to successfully complete a range of challenges.
How will winners be selected?
Winners will be determined based on the final standings at the completion of the finals period.
Can we use other funding to help us participate in this challenge?
Yes, you may use other funding to support your team, subject to the terms described in the Official Rules. External funding will need to be disclosed by January 1, 2023.
Will Alexa customers be able to engage with our SimBot?
Your team will be required to submit its SimBot for certification and publication by the Amazon Alexa team. After certification, you will enter the Internal Amazon Beta Period, where Amazon employees will test your SimBot and provide feedback. After the Internal Amazon Beta Period, we will allow Amazon Alexa customers to try your SimBot and provide feedback to you. Amazon may impose Availability Criteria, or requirements the SimBot must meet before it will be made available to Alexa users. Availability Criteria may include criteria such as a minimum average customer rating, uptime requirements, and an ability to consistently filter offensive content.
Amazon launched the Echo in the UK, Germany, India, Japan, and other countries. Will localized languages be supported?
Your team must build its SimBot using U.S. English. Your SimBot will be available to Alexa customers in the U.S. Customers in other countries may also access it by setting their Amazon PFM (Preferred Marketplace) to U.S.
Will we publish our research from the Alexa Prize?
Yes. Publishing research papers as an outcome of your work on the Alexa Prize is required for all teams participating in the competition, although teams should not publish Amazon confidential information, as described in the Official Rules. The Alexa Prize requires all teams to submit a technical paper for the Alexa Prize proceedings. Your SimBot will not be selected for the finals if your team does not submit a technical paper for Alexa Prize proceedings. Papers will be published at the end of the competition in an online Proceedings of the Alexa Prize, which will be publicly available.

Teams may also publish research papers in third-party publications and conferences, as long as all papers are provided to Amazon for review at least two weeks before the submission deadlines and no research papers are published before the Alexa Prize proceedings are published without Amazon’s prior approval.
Who will own the intellectual property rights in my submission?
You will retain ownership over your SimBot. Amazon will have a non-exclusive license to any technology or software you develop in connection with the competition. See the Official Rules for details.
Prizes
What are the prizes for winning the competition?
A prize of $500,000 will be awarded to the team that creates the best SimBot. The second-place and third-place finalist teams will receive a $100,000 and a $50,000 prize, respectively. See the contest rules for details.
Do we get a stipend and devices to participate in the Alexa Prize?
Up to ten teams will be sponsored to participate in the Alexa Prize in November, 2021. These teams’ universities will receive a $250,000 research grant to fund the team members’ work over the year. Additional teams selected to participate in the SimBot Live Interaction challenge in June, 2022 will receive a $200,000 research grant to fund the team members’ work over the year.

The sponsorship includes one Alexa-enabled device per team member for up to a total of three devices per team and one Alexa-enabled device per faculty advisor, free AWS services to support the development of their SimBot, and support from the Alexa team.
How can the grant be spent?
The grants will be awarded with the intention that they will support two full-time students for the duration of the Competition and one month of the Faculty Advisor’s salary. No more than 35% of the research grants may be allocated to administrative fees. If your team would like to use the funds in another manner, your faculty advisor must receive approval from Amazon before doing so.
What happens if we are selected and receive a stipend but can no longer participate?
Stipends will be awarded in installments payable to the university. If your team withdraws before any of the installments, remaining funds will not be transferred to the university.
How will the prizes be distributed among a team?
The first, second, and third place prizes will be distributed equally among all registered team members. The official list of registered team members must be confirmed by January 30, 2023.
Timeline
What are the key milestones of the competition?
Teams must submit their applications between October 1, 2021 and October 31, 2021. Between November 1 and November 10, 2021, we will announce teams selected to participate. In the summer of 2022 following the public benchmark phase and the second application period teams will be invited to an Alexa Prize Bootcamp at Amazon where they will receive training on the resources made available to all competing teams. The finals will be scheduled between January 30 and March 27, 2023 and will determine the winning teams in the first annual SimBot Challenge.
If selected, when will we receive the stipend, devices, access to the Alexa Prize SimBot toolkit, our AWS account, and be introduced to our point of contact?
We will reach out to all teams no later than November 10, 2021 with instructions on next steps. Up to ten teams will be selected to receive a $250,000 stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free AWS services to support their development efforts, and support from the Alexa team.
More information
See the full competition rules or submit your questions. Need assistance? Email: alexaprizesupport@amazon.com

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Applied Scientist (2026-27 Campus, International Technology Team), Shanghai
CN, 31, Shanghai
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Data Scientist, Seller Fulfillment Services (SFS)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
If you have ever bought or sold anything on Amazon, you have touched Amazon Marketplace. Amazon’s Marketplace business is one of the largest in the world. We are now in 23 countries. We are growing fast, with customers in many more countries. Amazon’s platform is the engine that powers Amazon’s Marketplace businesses, and Sellers rely on this platform and our support to start selling on Amazon and to grow their business. Amazon Marketplace enables millions of Sellers worldwide to list hundreds of millions of products and manage orders for inventory across dozens of different categories and languages. While working with millions of Sellers worldwide, we constantly strive to improve the selection for Customers and the capabilities of our platform for Sellers. The Seller Fulfillment Services (SFS) team is looking for a motivated and innovative Data Scientist with strong analytical skills and practical experience to join our science team. As a key member of the SFS science team, you will provide expertise that helps accelerate the business. You will build science solutions that will help us to provide our customers with the largest selection of merchants at the lowest, and the most reliable delivery service regardless of the seller. You will research, design and improve on the models that will impact Amazon’s customer directly. You will be working in a highly collaborative environment partnering with various science, product management, engineering, operations, finance, business intelligence and analytics teams to develop science models to solve business problems. You will need to understand the business requirements and translate them into complex analytical outputs. You will design tests to explain performance of the models from impact on customer and cost perspective. You will create ML models to capture features impacting performance. You should be comfortable building prototypes, testing and improving them given the feedback from the real time data. You should be able to present your model and findings to a various range of stakeholders. Looking for candidate with expertise in the areas of machine learning. The candidate will be expected to work on numerous aspects, such as feature engineering, modeling, and hyper-parameter tuning. Challenges will involve dealing with very large data sets and requirements on throughput. Key job responsibilities Design, implement, test, deploy, and maintain innovative science solutions to accelerate our business. Create experiments and prototype implementations of new learning algorithms and prediction techniques. Collaborate with scientists, engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to design and implement software solutions for science problems. Use best practices to ensure a high standard of quality for all of the team deliverables
Applied 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 an Applied 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 independently 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 Applied Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
Applied Scientist III, Sponsored Products and Brands - Advertiser Growth and Strategies
US, NY, New York
We are looking for an Applied Scientist III to set the scientific direction for the next generation of agentic AI applications that guide Amazon advertisers. In this role you will define, lead and build the science behind agentic systems that reason, plan, and act autonomously to manage and optimize ad campaigns based on a deep understanding of the advertiser and the marketplace. You will own the agentic architecture end to end, partnering closely with product and engineering leaders to translate a long-term science vision into concrete research and engineering roadmaps. Working backwards from the needs of millions of advertisers, you will take the lead on medium-to-large, ambiguous problems where neither the problem nor the solution is well defined, and deliver customer-facing products that help advertisers create, optimize, and grow their campaigns. You will invent new methods at the product level, and drive their adoption across multiple teams. This role combines science leadership, technical depth, product focus, and business understanding: you will raise the science bar, build consensus on approach across partners, and mentor scientists and engineers while remaining deeply hands-on with the hardest technical problems. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist III on this team you will: - Define the science vision for the agentic campaign management system and, with product and engineering leaders, turn it into delivery roadmaps. - Build agentic systems that autonomously manage and optimize ad campaigns — encoding auction and marketplace dynamics (bidding, budget pacing, keyword and targeting decisions) while balancing advertiser ROI, shopper experience, and marketplace health. - Define and curate the datasets and signals needed to train and evaluate these agents — advertiser and campaign data, auction and bid/budget signals, impressions, clicks, conversions, and search-term/keyword performance. - Stay deeply hands-on: write production-quality, critical-path code and build core components that take agentic systems from prototype to launch. - Own the agentic architecture — planning, tool use and integration (e.g., MCP), long-horizon reasoning (e.g., ReAct, CoT/ToT), and multi-agent orchestration — and stay deeply hands-on, writing production-quality, critical-path code from prototype to launch. - Define the evaluation and safety methodology for agent workflows and drive its adoption as the bar for reliability and trust. - Drive the team's scientific agenda, mentor scientists and engineers, and represent the team in the internal and external scientific community. About the team The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. This team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting millions of advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in guidance systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem. Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware agentic advertiser guidance system that leverages LLMs together with tools such as auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This agentic framework, will operate across both chat and non-chat experiences in the ad console, scaling to natural language queries as well as autonomously manage campaigns based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular keyword recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning, MCP, and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.
Research Scientist , Special Projects
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company's Think Big leadership principle to the next level. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you're interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. As a Research Scientist, you will work with a unique and gifted team developing exciting products for consumers 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 intersection 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. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon's culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.
Senior Manager Applied Science, Prime Video Personalization & Discovery
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Prime Video Personalization and Discovery organization operates at a global scale and is a critical part of Prime Video’s flywheel. We are responsible for matching customers with the right content at the right time, at all touch points throughout customers' content discovery journey: from home page, title page, and search page, to showing recommendations at the end of an episode or a movie. We drive both immediate and long-term business objectives while delighting our customers. Key job responsibilities As a Sr. Manager, Applied Science, in the Prime Video Personalization and Discovery organization, you will be responsible for optimizing the complete customer experience, across the touch points throughout customers’ discovery journey. This includes building AI and optimization solutions, working with product, engineering teams to deliver the optimal balance of customer delight and business outcomes. About the team Prime Video Personalization and Discovery (PVPD) is dedicated to creating a highly personalized content discovery experience that not only delights our customers but also drives both short-and long-term business goals. Our scope includes personalized recommendations, search, marketing, and the advanced machine learning technology and infrastructure that underpins these experiences. Our mission is to automate and enhance customer engagement through personalization, using ML and Generative AI.
Applied Scientist, Automated Reasoning
US, NY, New York
Application deadline: Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning develop and apply bleeding-edge formal methods, automated reasoning techniques, and neurosymbolic approaches to ensure the security, reliability, and correctness of Amazon/AWS services and customer applications. Our tools are called billions of times daily, powering the backbone of Amazon's products and services. We are changing the way computer systems are developed and operated, raising the bar for security, durability, availability, and quality. At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Application areas span cloud infrastructure verification, cryptographic assurance, AI safety, drone safety, and formal guarantees for generative AI systems. Our methods range from interactive theorem proving and constraint solving to neuro-inspired proof search This is a unique opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of the business and help shape the technology, product, and business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical expertise within a fast-moving environment and make a large business and customer impact. Key job responsibilities • Design and implement algorithms and formal methods for automated reasoning, including constraint solving, model checking, static analysis, theorem proving, and program synthesis to verify the correctness, security, and reliability of computing systems. • Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and scientific innovation in your domain; own strategic problem solving and take the lead on design, implementation, and delivery of solutions with long-term quantifiable impact. • Develop new decision procedures, heuristics, and search strategies that improve the scalability and accuracy of verification tools; build and deploy production-grade automated reasoning systems at Amazon scale. • Explore and apply generative AI and machine learning techniques to enhance automated reasoning capabilities, including learning-based heuristics for search and optimization, neural approaches to symbolic reasoning, and methods for verifying the correctness of AI-generated code. • Develop automated reasoning techniques for generative AI and agentic coding systems, including methods for ensuring the safety and alignment of autonomous software agents and applying formal guarantees to large language model outputs. • Conduct original research snd publish findings in peer-reviewed venues. • Work with customer teams to understand the nature of their software and the properties they need to establish; identify tools and methods capable of addressing verification needs, including novel analysis capabilities. • Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing deep knowledge and experience; collaborate with partner teams to translate verification capabilities into production systems. • Mentor scientists and engineers on formal methods, neurosymbolic techniques, and best practices for building reliable automated reasoning systems; assist in career development of others.
Applied Scientist, Amazon Customer Service
US, CA, Santa Clara
The Data Intelligence team is a new function within Amazon Customer Service (CS). We own the end-to-end process of defining, building, implementing, and monitoring a comprehensive data strategy. We also develop and apply Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Machine Learning (ML), Ontology, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enhance customer service associate and customer experiences. As an Applied Scientist, you'll own the definition and implementation of customer-focused, AI-driven innovation in Amazon Customer Service globally, leveraging GenAI, ML, and/or NLP to transform complex business requirements and customer needs into innovative technology solutions. Your expertise will be key in shaping data-driven strategies and addressing complex data challenges. With your expertise in AI, text analysis, embeddings, language modeling, and generation, you'll design and develop scalable AI-powered technology solutions, prioritize initiatives, drive data-driven insights, and deliver business impact. This position will advance applied science best practices, leverage data and AI to drive customer experience improvements, and set new global standards for customer experience. This role requires you to work with a cross-functional team, including scientists, engineers, and product managers, to develop scalable and maintainable AI solutions for both structured and unstructured data. The ideal candidate has strong technical skills in AI techniques (e.g., automated reasoning, reasoning, planning, knowledge representation), excellent written documentation skills, and experience with big data technologies. Success in this role requires combining deep business knowledge with hands-on technical skills to solve customer problems and address complex technical challenges. Key job responsibilities - Develop innovative solutions to complex problems (e.g., Automated Reasoning for Trusted AI-Enabled Customer Service). - Apply technical expertise to implement novel algorithms and modeling solutions, in collaboration with other scientists and engineers. - Analyze data and define metrics to identify actionable insights and measure improvements in customer experience. - Communicate results and insights to both technical and non-technical audiences through written reports, presentations, and internal/external publications. - Collaborate with product management and engineering teams to integrate and optimize models in production systems. A day in the life A typical day as an Applied Scientist in the Data Intelligence team involves combining business expertise with hands-on problem-solving in ML and AI. The role encompasses tackling complex data initiatives, ensuring alignment with customer needs and business objectives, and translating business requirements into practical AI-driven solutions. Working collaboratively with cross-functional teams, this position involves designing and enhancing AI models, focusing on efficiency, precision, and scalability. Daily activities include ensuring data quality, monitoring model performance, and generating actionable insights from vast amounts of information. Each day presents opportunities to resolve complex technical challenges, advance important AI projects, and conceive innovative ways to leverage data in transforming the customer experience. About the team The Data Intelligence team is a new function within Amazon Customer Service. We develop and apply Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enhance customer service associate and customer experiences.
Applied Scientist II, AWS Just-Walk-Out Science Team
US, CA, East Palo Alto
As part of the AWS Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon’s unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers’ businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon’s real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. Key job responsibilities Everyone on the team needs to be entrepreneurial, wear many hats and work in a highly collaborative environment that’s more startup than big company. We’ll need to tackle problems that span a variety of domains: computer vision, image recognition, machine learning, real-time and distributed systems. As an Applied Scientist, you will help solve a variety of technical challenges and mentor other scientists. You will tackle challenging, novel situations every day and given the size of this initiative, you’ll have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon in different locations. You should be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity that’s higher than most projects and relish the idea of solving problems that, frankly, haven’t been solved at scale before - anywhere. Along the way, we guarantee that you’ll learn a ton, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people. A key focus of this role will be developing and implementing advanced visual reasoning systems that can understand complex spatial relationships and object interactions in real-time. You'll work on designing autonomous AI agents that can make intelligent decisions based on visual inputs, understand customer behavior patterns, and adapt to dynamic retail environments. This includes developing systems that can perform complex scene understanding, reason about object permanence, and predict customer intentions through visual cues. About the team Just Walk Out (JWO) is a new kind of store with no lines and no checkout—you just grab and go! Customers simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take what they want from our selection of fresh, delicious meals and grocery essentials, and go! Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by our Just Walk Out Technology, which automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your account and send you a receipt. Check it out at amazon.com/go. Designed and custom-built by Amazonians, our Just Walk Out Technology uses a variety of technologies including computer vision, sensor fusion, and advanced machine learning. Innovation is part of our DNA! Our goal is to be Earths’ most customer centric company and we are just getting started. We need people who want to join an ambitious program that continues to push the state of the art in computer vision, machine learning, distributed systems and hardware design.
Member of Technical Staff, Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR)
US, CA, San Francisco
Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, locomotion, manipulation, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models and multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's vast computational resources, enabling you to tackle ambitious problems in areas like very large multi-modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications. Key job responsibilities - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robotics foundation models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization - Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish - Lead full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges - Lead technical initiatives from conception to deployment, working closely with robotics engineers to integrate your solutions into production systems - Participate in technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders and fellow scientists - Leverage our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through innovative foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
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