Carlos Avello

US, NY, New York

We are seeking a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Research Scientist to develop cutting-edge interactions that make robots feel alive, personal, and fun. In this role, you will focus on verbal and non-verbal conversational systems, social dynamics, memory, and long-term relationship formation between robots, their environments, and the people they interact with. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling expressive, socially intelligent, and trustworthy interactions between robots and humans.

Research Scientist, Mobile Manipulation Robotics (I/O)

US, MA, North Reading

Amazon Robotics is transforming warehouse automation through edge AI and machine learning applied to real-world robotics challenges. We're seeking a Research Scientist to advance our mobile manipulation capabilities by developing novel learning-based approaches that enable robots to navigate and manipulate objects in dynamic fulfillment environments. This role offers the opportunity to conduct original research and translate state-of-the-art findings into production systems operating at Amazon's unprecedented scale. Key job responsibilities Research and Algorithm Development: Formulate novel research problems in robot learning and manipulation, design new model architectures, validate hypotheses through rigorous experimentation, and advance the state of the art in learning-based robotics. Data Strategy and Pipeline Design: Define data requirements for research initiatives, design scalable collection and curation strategies, establish governance and provenance standards, and build reusable pipelines ensuring data quality and reproducibility. Experimentation and Scientific Validation: Design and execute experiments in simulation and real-world embodiments, develop evaluation methodologies and benchmarks, perform ablation studies and statistical analyses, and iterate systematically to advance model performance. Prototyping and Research Infrastructure: Develop clean, well-documented research codebases, build experimentation frameworks and evaluation tooling, contribute to shared training infrastructure, and implement interfaces for broader robotics integration. Scientific Leadership and Publication: Drive an independent research agenda aligned with team objectives, publish at top-tier venues (e.g., RSS, CoRL, ICRA, NeurIPS), identify research gaps through literature reviews, and present findings via technical reports and talks. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with scientists, engineers, and leaders across teams to translate research into deployable solutions, mentor junior researchers, contribute to the team's scientific culture, and support integration with robotics hardware teams. A day in the life 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!

Applied Scientist, Neuron ARG, Annapurna ML

US, WA, Seattle

Are you a PhD interested in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, automated reasoning, robotics, or quantum technologies? We are looking for skilled scientists capable of putting theory into practice through experimentation and invention, leveraging science techniques and implementing systems to work on massive datasets in an effort to tackle never-before-solved problems. A successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, strong attention to detail, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. As an Applied Scientist, you will own the design and development of end-to-end systems. You’ll have the opportunity to create technical roadmaps, and drive production level projects that will support Amazon Science. You will work closely with Amazon scientists, and other science interns to develop solutions and deploy them into production. The ideal scientist must have the ability to work with diverse groups of people and cross-functional teams to solve complex business problems. Key job responsibilities Amazon Science gives insight into the company’s approach to customer-obsessed scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists use our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work. For more information on the Amazon Science community please visit https://www.amazon.science.

Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Connect

US, NY, New York

Are you excited about applying machine learning and statistical modeling to real-world systems that serve millions of customers? Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that helps businesses deliver personal, efficient customer experiences. Our team of scientists and engineers builds the AI and ML capabilities that power contact center operations and optimization. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to tackle scientifically complex challenges in areas such as stochastic modeling, queueing theory, anomaly detection, and optimization. In this role, you will design and deploy novel ML models and algorithms that directly improve how businesses interact with their customers. You will work at the intersection of research and production, turning ambiguous problems into scalable solutions that shape the future of cloud-based customer service. Key job responsibilities - Design and deploy novel machine learning models and algorithms to solve complex problems in contact center operations, including forecasting, routing optimization, and anomaly detection. - Lead the scientific agenda for your team by identifying new research opportunities, proposing initiatives, and driving them from concept through production deployment. - Collaborate with engineering teams to architect and implement scalable ML systems, personally contributing significant portions of the critical scientific components. - Mentor fellow scientists and engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and scientific guidance, raising the overall technical bar of the team. - Evaluate and advance the team's ML methodology by benchmarking against current academic and industry research, and by publishing findings internally and externally when appropriate. A day in the life You might start your morning reviewing experiment results from a new forecasting model, then join a design session with engineers to discuss how to integrate it into the production pipeline. After lunch, you could be whiteboarding a novel approach to a queueing optimization problem with a fellow scientist, followed by a code review for a teammate. You will regularly present your research findings to stakeholders across the organization and contribute to the team's publication efforts. About the team Our team within Amazon Connect focuses on building intelligent, ML-driven capabilities that help businesses run their contact centers more effectively. We work closely with product, engineering, and science partners to turn research ideas into features that customers rely on every day. We value curiosity, collaboration, and scientific rigor, and we are investing in new AI capabilities that will continue to transform the customer service industry. If you want to see your research make a tangible impact at scale, this is the place to do it.

Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Content Reasoning, Enrichment & Localization

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 subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, 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. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you!

Senior Applied Scientist, Real-Time Conversational AI , AGI

US, CA, Sunnyvale

We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to help drive the research and development of real-time multimodal conversational AI. You will contribute across two focus areas: advancing foundation models for speech and audio, and building the post-training systems (reward modeling, reinforcement learning) that shape natural, human-like conversational behavior. You will own a significant research area and contribute across the full model lifecycle — from pre-training and architecture design through post-training alignment and real-time deployment. You will work at the frontier of what’s possible in conversational AI, with the compute, data, and runway to pursue problems that few teams in the world have the resources to tackle. As a Senior Scientist, you will drive the technical execution of your research area, contribute to the team’s roadmap, and work closely with inference engineers to ensure your models are designed for real-time production deployment. Key job responsibilities What You’ll Do Foundation Model Scaling - Help build and train large-scale multimodal foundation models for real-time speech and audio generation, from architecture design through production-scale training - Advance the scaling and efficiency of conversational models, including the relationship between data, model size, and real-time performance - Design model architectures informed by hardware constraints and inference requirements, working with inference engineers to ensure models are servable from inception - Develop training methodologies for multimodal models that jointly process and generate speech, language, and audio in real-time streaming contexts - Contribute to the state of the art on efficient architectures and training methods for conversational AI at scale Post-Training & Reinforcement Learning - Design and build reward models and reward functions for speech systems — capturing naturalness, fluency, conversational quality, and real-time responsiveness - Develop and apply reinforcement learning methods to shape conversational behavior — teaching models natural timing, responsiveness, and fluid interaction - Build parts of the post-training pipeline from SFT through RL alignment, optimized for real-time multimodal outputs rather than text-only generation - Design evaluation frameworks that capture the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation (latency sensitivity, audio quality, prosody, interaction naturalness) Real-Time Perception & Generation - Advance the team’s capabilities in real-time perception — the ability of the model to process incoming audio/speech while simultaneously generating responses - Develop techniques for natural interactive systems where the model handles concurrent input and output with human-like timing - Work at the intersection of model architecture and production constraints to ensure multimodal capabilities function within hard real-time latency budgets

Applied Scientist I, Amazon Shipping

IN, HR, Gurugram

Building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. Key job responsibilities 1. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 2. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. 3. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 4 Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 5. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing.

Sr. Applied Scientist, DemandTech - AdDelivery, Experience and Measurement

US, NY, New York

Want to work on building a Amazon Ads billion dollar business, innovate on a new product, and have a positive impact on millions of views while working with industry-leading technologies? We're growing a team to support the Sponsored Ads business that powers the advertising experience for millions of viewers and advertisers daily. Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business and developing a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are constantly challenging ourselves to create world-class products and an unparalleled shopping experience for our hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities We are building the next-gen smart ads campaign. At its core is an Intelligence Flywheel — an architecture where every component's output is designed to train models that improve every other component. The Model Layer that is meant to power every capability currently has no dedicated science ownership. As the Senior Applied Scientist on this team, you own the science that makes the flywheel turn. You will turn static, threshold-based logic into self-improving, closed-loop intelligence, and define the decision policies that let the system act autonomously with advertiser trust. Concretely, you will: * Build predictive issue-detection models that identify under-delivery, over-delivery, and performance degradation from campaign signals before they materially impact advertisers. * Design the intervention-selection policy — which autonomous action to take — framed as a contextual bandit: choose, observe, update. Engineers implement action execution; you define the policy that selects actions. * Establish causal attribution for autonomous optimization, separating the effect of our interventions from organic performance change, so improvements can be attributed and advertiser trust in autonomy can be earned. * Integrate and adapt cross-model signals. Combine creative-quality, product-relevance, and budget signals into a unified advertiser-intelligence picture, and adapt general-purpose partner models to our product reality via fine-tuning, re-ranking, or thin adaptation layers. * Close recommendation and grading feedback loops — define reward schemas for accept/reject and performance-vs-baseline signals, correlate creative-quality scores with real campaign outcomes, and feed empirical findings back to both our product and partner science teams. You will work backwards from ambiguous business problems, set the science roadmap for the Model Layer, and partner closely with the team's software engineers — who own the services, pipelines, and execution infrastructure — so that model artifacts you produce are deployed and served in production. This is a high-leverage, high-autonomy role: your outputs are consumed by multiple engineering workstreams at once, and you set the abstractions the team builds on. About the team We are focused on goal-oriented, AI powered workflows that help advertisers achieve their marketing objectives. We collect campaign goals, surface relevant data at key decision points, and provide reporting that validates decision-making. Our product suite guides advertisers in building campaigns with optimal targeting, creative formats, inventory, and bid models that are highly likely to hit their goals — reducing the need for manual intervention.

Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science

US, WA, Seattle

At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product relevant information at unprecedented scale with Frontier Models and Agents. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity ranging from electronics to groceries to digital content. The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Enriching product information requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data, all while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily. Amazon's Catalog System Services Science team is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers. Key job responsibilities - Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval. In essence, translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks - Design and implement leading models leveraging frontier models, and agentic architectures to enrich catalog information at billion-product scale - Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions - Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment, processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks - Represent the team in the broader science community - publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research

Applied Scientist, Customer360

US, WA, Seattle

What happens when you give AI the ability to remember? Not cached responses — real structured memory that compounds over time and transfers across contexts. We're building the science behind this, and we need researchers who want to own the problem end-to-end. This is a founding role on a new team. You won't inherit models or maintain someone else's pipeline. You'll define the research direction, run experiments at scale, and ship what works directly to production. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in our team, you will be responsible for the research, design, and development of new AI technologies for knowledge acquisition and retrieval. You will adopt or invent new machine learning and analytical techniques in the realm of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and large language models. Specific responsibilities include: 1. Design and implement novel approaches to knowledge extraction from heterogeneous, unstructured data sources at organizational scale. 2. Build retrieval systems that match intent to relevant knowledge across domains — solving the "right memory at the right time" problem. 3. Own the quality of memory generation: what to capture, how to structure it, when to surface it, and when to let it decay. 4. Run large-scale experiments using Amazon's compute infrastructure and massive real-world datasets. 5. Develop evaluation frameworks for a system where "quality" means something new — right knowledge, right context, right confidence level. 6. Collaborate with engineers to move from research prototype to production system in weeks, not quarters. 7. Invent new approaches to temporal knowledge management — how memories age, conflict, and compound over time. 8. Publish and patent novel approaches to knowledge acquisition and retrieval at top-tier venues. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate insights and opportunities, execute experiments, and develop statistical and ML models. The team is driven by business needs, which requires collaboration with other Scientists, Engineers, and Product Managers across the organization. You get to influence stakeholders with clear communication skills. You innovate on behalf of the customer and strategically build features. You will mentor junior members and help them grow. About the team We're a new team within Personalization, focused on a different kind of recommendation: not "what product should this customer see" but "what knowledge should this AI use right now." Same scale, same rigor, entirely new problem space. The science is at the intersection of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and LLM reasoning — and the right approach hasn't been established yet. The team values innovation and offers a safe place to try, fail, and learn while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Everyone is a leader and owner for everything we do as a team. We offer creative space with an entrepreneurial work environment focusing on customer obsession.

Carlos Avello

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