Newsletter
Social

TaskBot Challenge FAQs

Frequently asked questions about the challenge.
TaskBot
TaskBot
What is a TaskBot?
A TaskBot is a conversational agent that assists customers in completing DIY and Cooking tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. It is the second conversational AI challenge to incorporate multimodal (voice and vision) customer experiences.
Can I choose to build any type of conversational bot?
No, you must build a TaskBot.
What will my TaskBot do?
A TaskBot helps customers complete tasks that require multiple steps and decisions in target domains such as hobbies and at-home activities such as Home Improvement and Cooking. For example, customers could ask a TaskBot to help them “bake a healthy birthday cake”. A successful TaskBot will be able to discuss different approaches to nutrition and understand individual customer’s preferences. It would then walk the customer through baking a cake step-by-step, while solving problems arising along the way, e.g., missing ingredients, and continue the conversation over multiple-days sessions.
How will I build my TaskBot?
You will use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to build an Alexa skill, hosted on AWS Lambda that will create the end-to-end conversational experience for a user. Using the provided APIs, your skill will receive as input the text of the user’s utterance, and produce as output a text sentence that will be spoken to the user. You do not need to tackle ASR (automatic speech recognition) or TTS (text to speech). You will also be provided with the TaskBot Toolkit (a conversational bot toolkit), a software development kit that works with ASK and was built specifically for Alexa Prize teams to reduce the involved engineering in setting up a TaskBot and allow teams to focus on the science.


Your skill will need to determine an appropriate response at each turn of the conversation. You may use additional data sources or libraries if you wish, subject to the terms described in the Official Rules.
What is the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)?
The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of free, self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that make it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa. Your team will use ASK to build, deploy, and test a TaskBot that is capable of conversing with millions of Alexa users.
What is TaskBot toolkit?
TaskBot, is a conversational bot toolkit in Python for natural language understanding and dialog management. The toolkit provides a set of tools, libraries and base models designed to help develop, train and deploy multimodal conversational experiences through the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), and to provide uniform visual look for TaskBots on screened devices. The primary goal of the toolkit is to drive improved quality of conversational agents by providing a solution that is modular, extensible, and scalable, and provide abstractions for infrastructure and low-level tasks.
Competition details
How will winners be selected?
Through various phases of the competition, TaskBots will be evaluated based on feedback from Alexa users and assessment by Amazon.


Midway through the competition, all TaskBots that have been certified and published will be evaluated by Alexa users and Amazon. As defined in the Official Rules, TaskBots that meet the required criteria will advance to later phases of the competition and eventually the semifinals.



During the semifinals round, Alexa users will evaluate the semifinalist TaskBots. Two TaskBots selected by Alexa users and up to three TaskBots selected by the Amazon panel will advance to the finals. During the finals in September 2023, the finalist teams will compete head-to-head in front of judges. The judges will score the TaskBots on their ability to successfully complete the task requested.
Will this competition be judged like a Turing Test?
No. The goal of the Alexa Prize is to create TaskBots that fluently and effectively assist the user, not to make them indistinguishable from a human when compared side-by-side. While the TaskBots built for the Alexa Prize will be human-like in some respects, they will be very different in others, and could easily reveal themselves in a Turing Test. For example, TaskBots may have ready access to much more information than a human. Asking the TaskBots to act like a human could diminish the customer experience and hinder the efforts of the participants to build the best TaskBot to further conversational AI.
When and where is the finals event?
The finals event will be held in September 2023 at a location to be determined, with the results will be announced in September 2023.
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 must be disclosed to Amazon.
Can we use technology other than AWS to host our TaskBot?
Your team may build its TaskBot in any framework of your choosing, but the TaskBot must be hosted on AWS to leverage Alexa’s TaskBot toolkit.
Will Alexa customers be able to engage with our TaskBot?
Your team will be required to submit its TaskBot 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 TaskBot and provide feedback. After the Internal Amazon Beta Period, we will allow Alexa users to try your TaskBot and provide feedback to you. Amazon may impose requirements that the TaskBots must meet before they will be made available to Alexa users. Such requirements, specified in the Official Rules, may include, among other things, a minimum average customer rating, uptime requirements, or the ability to consistently filter offensive content.
Which Alexa users will be able to interact with the TaskBots, and what languages must they support?
TaskBots will be made available to Alexa users in the United States or who select the United States as their preferred marketplace. Your team must build its TaskBot using U.S. English.
Will we publish our research from the Alexa Prize?
Yes. Publishing research papers as an outcome of your work on Alexa Prize is required for all teams participating in the competition, although teams may 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 TaskBot will not be selected for the finals if your team does not submit a technical paper for Alexa Prize proceedings. Papers will be published online at the end of the competition and made 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, unless Amazon approves otherwise in writing.
Who will own the intellectual property rights in my submission?
You will retain ownership over your TaskBot. 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.
Eligibility
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, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, the region of Crimea, and where prohibited by law (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 my participation in 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.
Teams
How many teams will be selected to participate?
All applications will be reviewed and evaluated by Amazon. Up to ten teams will be selected and sponsored by Amazon. All teams will receive a $250,000 grant intended to support two full-time students and 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 is no minimum or maximum number of team members. All team members must be enrolled in their university throughout their participation. All teams will receive a $250,000 grant 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?
No. 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. Multiple teams cannot have the same faculty advisor.
Can I participate on two separate teams?
No. 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, there will be a period of time during which faculty advisors may request to remove or add members to the team, subject to approval by Amazon. See the Official Rules for details.
Can we discuss our TaskBot with faculty or students who aren’t on our team?
Only team members may work on their TaskBots. 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?
Please fill in the Taskbot Challenge 2 application hosted on YouNoodle.
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 submit only one application 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 Amazon. Teams will be selected by Amazon 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 evaluation of your proposal.
Prizes
What are the prizes for winning the competition?
A prize of $500,000 will be awarded to team that creates the best TaskBot. The second-place and third-place finalist teams will receive a $100,000 and a $50,000 prize, respectively. See the Official 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 competition. Each sponsored team’s university will receive a $250,000 research grant to help fund the team’s participation.


The sponsorship includes Alexa-enabled devices, free AWS services to support the development of the team’s TaskBot, and support from the Alexa team.
How can the grant be spent?
The grants are intended to 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 grant 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.
Timeline
What are the key milestones of the competition?
Teams must submit their applications by early November, 2022. Teams selected to participate in the competition will be notified by early January, 2023. The competition will run from about January 2023 through September 2023. See the Official Rules for details.
More information
See the Official Rules or submit your questions. Need assistance? Email: alexaprizesupport@amazon.com

Latest news

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

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Applied Scientist III, Amzn Shipping-Prd & Tech, Amzn Shipping-Prd & Tech
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
Applied Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
Applied Scientist II, Alexa AI
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field - 2-7 years experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
Data Scientist, AWS Industries
GB, London
Are you looking to work at the forefront of Machine Learning and AI? Would you be excited to apply cutting edge Generative AI algorithms to solve real world problems with significant impact? The AWS Industries Team at AWS helps AWS customers implement Generative AI solutions and realize transformational business opportunities for AWS customers in the most strategic industry verticals. This is a team of data scientists, engineers, and architects working step-by-step with customers to build bespoke solutions that harness the power of generative AI. The team helps customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, select and train and fine tune the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, develop proof-of-concepts, and build applications to launch these solutions at scale. The AWS Industries team provides guidance and implements best practices for applying generative AI responsibly and cost efficiently. You will work directly with customers and innovate in a fast-paced organization that contributes to game-changing projects and technologies. You will design and run experiments, research new algorithms, and find new ways of optimizing risk, profitability, and customer experience. In this Data Scientist role you will be capable of using GenAI and other techniques to design, evangelize, and implement and scale cutting-edge solutions for never-before-solved problems. Key job responsibilities - Collaborate with AI/ML scientists, engineers, and architects to research, design, develop, and evaluate cutting-edge generative AI algorithms and build ML systems to address real-world challenges - Interact with customers directly to understand the business problem, help and aid them in implementation of generative AI solutions, deliver briefing and deep dive sessions to customers and guide customer on adoption patterns and paths to production - Create and deliver best practice recommendations, tutorials, blog posts, publications, sample code, and presentations adapted to technical, business, and executive stakeholder - Provide customer and market feedback to Product and Engineering teams to help define product direction About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred 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. Why AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. 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. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, 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 (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship and 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.
Principal Applied Scientist, Agentic AI, Sponsored Products Ads
US, CA, Palo Alto
Amazon Sponsored Products is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of GenAI/LLM powered self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to Amazon’s Selling Partners and key to driving their long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. This role will be pivotal within the Autonomous Campaigns org of Sponsored Products Ads, where we're pioneering the development of AI-powered advertising innovations that will redefine the future of campaign management and optimization. As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will lead the charge in creating the next generation of self-operating, GenAI-driven advertising systems that will set a new standard for the industry. Our team is at the forefront of designing and implementing these transformative technologies, which will leverage advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and sophisticated chain-of-thought reasoning to achieve true advertising autonomy. Your work will bring to life systems capable of deeply understanding the nuanced context of each product, market trends, and consumer behavior, making intelligent, real-time decisions that surpass human capabilities. By harnessing the power of these future-state GenAI systems, we will develop advertising solutions capable of autonomously selecting optimal keywords, dynamically adjusting bids based on complex market conditions, and optimizing product targeting across various Amazon platforms. Crucially, these systems will continuously analyze performance metrics and implement strategic pivots, all without requiring manual intervention from advertisers, allowing them to focus on their core business while our AI works tirelessly on their behalf. This is not simply about automating existing processes; your work will redefine what's possible in advertising. Our GenAI systems will employ multi-step reasoning, considering a vast array of factors, from seasonality and competitive landscape to macroeconomic trends, to make decisions that far exceed human speed and effectiveness. This autonomous, context-aware approach represents a paradigm shift in how advertising campaigns are conceived, executed, and optimized. As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will be at the forefront of this transformation, tackling complex challenges in natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and causal inference. Your pioneering efforts will directly shape the future of e-commerce advertising, with the potential to influence marketplace dynamics on a global scale. This is an unparalleled opportunity to push the boundaries of what's achievable in AI-driven advertising and leave an indelible mark on the industry. Key job responsibilities • Seek to understand in depth the Sponsored Products offering at Amazon and identify areas of opportunities to grow our business using GenAI, LLM, and ML solutions. • Mentor and guide the applied scientists in our organization and hold us to a high standard of technical rigor and excellence in AI/ML. • Design and lead organization-wide AI/ML roadmaps to help our Amazon shoppers have a delightful shopping experience while creating long term value for our advertisers. • Work with our engineering partners and draw upon your experience to meet latency and other system constraints. • Identify untapped, high-risk technical and scientific directions, and devise new research directions that you will drive to completion and deliver. • Be responsible for communicating our Generative AI/ Traditional AI/ML innovations to the broader internal & external scientific community.
Sr. Applied Scientist, Advertising Incrementality Measurement
US, CO, Boulder
Do you want to lead the Ads industry and redefine how we measure the effectiveness of the WW Amazon Ads business? Are you passionate about causal inference, Deep Learning/DNN, raising the science bar, and connecting leading-edge science research to Amazon-scale implementation? If so, come join Amazon Ads to be an Applied Science leader within our Advertising Incrementality Measurement science team! Key job responsibilities As an Applied Science leader within the Advertising Incrementality Measurement (AIM) science team, you are responsible for defining and executing on key workstreams within our overall causal measurement science vision. In particular, you will lead the science development of our Deep Neural Net (DNN) ML model, a foundational ML model to understand the impact of individual ad touchpoints for billions of daily ad touchpoints. You will work on a team of Applied Scientists, Economists, and Data Scientists to work backwards from customer needs and translate product ideas into concrete science deliverables. You will be a thought leader for inventing scalable causal measurement solutions that support highly accurate and actionable causal insights--from defining and executing hundreds of thousands of RCTs, to developing an exciting science R&D agenda. You will solve hard problems, advance science at Amazon, and be a leading innovator in the causal measurement of advertising effectiveness. In this role, you will work with a team of applied scientists, economists, engineers, product managers, and UX designers to define and build the future of advertising causal measurement. You will be working with massive data, a dedicated engineering team, and industry-leading partner scientists. Your team’s work will help shape the future of Amazon Advertising.
Applied Scientist, SPX AI Lab
US, WA, Seattle
The Selling Partner Experience (SPX) organization strives to make Amazon the best place for Selling Partners to do business. The SPX Science team is building an AI-powered conversational assistant to transform the Selling Partner experience. The Selling Assistant is a trusted partner and a seasoned advisor that’s always available to enable our partners to thrive in Amazon’s stores. It takes away the cognitive load of selling on Amazon by providing a single interface to handle a diverse set of selling needs. The assistant always stays by the seller's side, talks to them in their language, enables them to capitalize on opportunities, and helps them accomplish their business goals with ease. It is powered by the state-of-the-art Generative AI, going beyond a typical chatbot to provide a personalized experience to sellers running real businesses, large and small. Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists, engineers, product and program managers who use the latest Generative AI and Machine Learning technologies to help Amazon create a delightful Selling Partner experience? Do you want to build solutions to real business problems by automatically understanding and addressing sellers’ challenges, needs and opportunities? Are you excited by the prospect of contributing to one of Amazon’s most strategic Generative AI initiatives? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Selling Partner Experience Science team. Key job responsibilities - Use state-of-the-art Machine Learning and Generative AI techniques to create the next generation of the tools that empower Amazon's Selling Partners to succeed. - Design, develop and deploy highly innovative models to interact with Sellers and delight them with solutions. - Work closely with teams of scientists and software engineers to drive real-time model implementations and deliver novel and highly impactful features. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model benchmarking, model validation and model implementation. - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches. - Participate in strategic initiatives to employ the most recent advances in ML in a fast-paced, experimental environment. About the team Selling Partner Experience Science is a growing team of scientists, engineers and product leaders engaged in the research and development of the next generation of ML-driven technology to empower Amazon's Selling Partners to succeed. We draw from many science domains, from Natural Language Processing to Computer Vision to Optimization to Economics, to create solutions that seamlessly and automatically engage with Sellers, solve their problems, and help them grow. We are focused on building seller facing AI-powered tools using the latest science advancements to empower sellers to drive the growth of their business. We strive to radically simplify the seller experience, lowering the cognitive burden of selling on Amazon by making it easy to accomplish critical tasks such as launching new products, understanding and complying with Amazon’s policies and taking actions to grow their business.
Applied Scientist, Seller Fees Science & Tech
US, WA, Seattle
The Seller Fees organization drives the monetization infrastructure powering Amazon's global marketplace, processing billions of transactions for over two million active third-party sellers worldwide. Our team owns the complete technical stack and strategic vision for fee computation systems, leveraging advanced machine learning to optimize seller experiences and maintain fee integrity at unprecedented scale. We're seeking an exceptional Applied Scientist to push the boundaries of large-scale ML systems in a business-critical domain. This role presents unique opportunities to • Architect and deploy state-of-the-art transformer-based models for fee classification and anomaly detection across hundreds of millions of products • Pioneer novel applications of multimodal LLMs to analyze product attributes, images, and seller metadata for intelligent fee determination • Build production-scale generative AI systems for fee integrity and seller communications • Advance the field of ML through novel research in high-stakes, large-scale transaction processing • Develop SOTA causal inference frameworks integrated with deep learning to understand fee impacts and optimize seller outcomes • Collaborate with world-class scientists and engineers to solve complex problems at the intersection of deep learning, economics, and large business systems. If you're passionate about advancing the state-of-the-art in applied ML/AI while tackling challenging problems at global scale, we want you on our team! Key job responsibilities Responsibilities: . Design measurable and scalable science solutions that can be adopted across stores worldwide with different languages, policy and requirements. · Integrate AI (both generative and symbolic) into compound agentic workflows to transform complex business systems into intelligent ones for both internal and external customers. · Develop large scale classification and prediction models using the rich features of text, image and customer interactions and state-of-the-art techniques. · Research and implement novel machine learning, statistical and econometrics approaches. · Write high quality code and implement scalable models within the production systems. · Stay up to date with relevant scientific publications. · Collaborate with business and software teams both within and outside of the fees organization.
Senior Applied Scientist, Selling Partner Growth
US, WA, Seattle
Join us in the evolution of Amazon’s Seller business! The Selling Partner Growth organization is the growth and development engine for our Store. Partnering with business, product, and engineering, we catalyze SP growth with comprehensive and accurate data, unique insights, and actionable recommendations and collaborate with WW SP facing teams to drive adoption and create feedback loops. We strongly believe that any motivated SP should be able to grow their businesses and reach their full potential supported by Amazon tools and resources. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to lead us to identify data-driven insight and opportunities to improve our SP growth strategy and drive new seller success. As a successful applied scientist on our talented team of scientists and engineers, you will solve complex problems to identify actionable opportunities, and collaborate with engineering, research, and business teams for future innovation. You need to have deep understanding on the business domain and have the ability to connect business with science. You are also strong in ML modeling and scientific foundation with the ability to collaborate with engineering to put models in production to answer specific business questions. You are an expert at synthesizing and communicating insights and recommendations to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. You will continue to contribute to the research community, by working with scientists across Amazon, as well as collaborating with academic researchers and publishing papers (www.aboutamazon.com/research). Key job responsibilities As a Sr. Applied Scientist in the team, you will: - Identify opportunities to improve SP growth and translate those opportunities into science problems via principled statistical solutions (e.g. ML, causal, RL). - Mentor and guide the applied scientists in our organization and hold us to a high standard of technical rigor and excellence in MLOps. - Design and lead roadmaps for complex science projects to help SP have a delightful selling experience while creating long term value for our shoppers. - Work with our engineering partners and draw upon your experience to meet latency and other system constraints. - Identify untapped, high-risk technical and scientific directions, and simulate new research directions that you will drive to completion and deliver. - Be responsible for communicating our science innovations to the broader internal & external scientific community.
Principal Applied Scientist, Hardware Silicon and Systems Group
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Our team leads the development and optimization of on-device ML models for Amazon's hardware products, including audio, vision, and multi-modal AI features. We work at the critical intersection of ML innovation and silicon design, ensuring AI capabilities can run efficiently on resource-constrained devices. Currently, we enable production ML models across multiple device families, including Echo, Ring/Blink, and other consumer devices. Our work directly impacts Amazon's customer experiences in consumer AI device market. The solutions we develop determine which AI features can be offered on-device versus requiring cloud connectivity, ultimately shaping product capabilities and customer experience across Amazon's hardware portfolio. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of AI in consumer devices at unprecedented scale. You'll be at the forefront of developing industry-first model architectures and compression techniques that will power AI features across millions of Amazon devices worldwide. Your innovations will directly enable new AI features that enhance how customers interact with Amazon products every day. Come join our team! Key job responsibilities As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will: • Own the technical architecture and optimization strategy for ML models deployed across Amazon's device ecosystem, from existing to yet-to-be-shipped products. • Develop novel model architectures optimized for our custom silicon, establishing new methodologies for model compression and quantization. • Create an evaluation framework for model efficiency and implement multimodal optimization techniques that work across vision, language, and audio tasks. • Define technical standards for model deployment and drive research initiatives in model efficiency to guide future silicon designs. • Spend the majority of your time doing deep technical work - developing novel ML architectures, writing critical optimization code, and creating proof-of-concept implementations that demonstrate breakthrough efficiency gains. • Influence architecture decisions impacting future silicon generations, establish standards for model optimization, and mentor others in advanced ML techniques.
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 monthly newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2025 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social