Author

Chris Poon

Research Scientist

Latest news

US, MA, Boston
We are looking for researchers who aim to build super-intelligent AI systems that leverage proof assistants to guide learning and reasoning. Our neuro-symbolic AI technology is applied across a wide range of science and engineering domains within Amazon, and you will join the team at the forefront of this research. As an Applied Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the definition, vision, and development of product features from beginning to end. You will: - Define and implement new neuro-symbolic applications that employ scalable and efficient approaches to solve complex problems. - Work in an agile, startup-like development environment, where you are always working on the most important stuff. - Deliver high-quality scientific artifacts. About the team We work closely with academia. Our team includes an Amazon Scholar in mathematics, and we maintain active research collaborations with faculty at leading CS departments (MIT, Berkeley, CMU).
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 help the team leverage your expertise, by coaching and mentoring. You will contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and the engineering practices. You will independently as well as guide team to file for patents and/or publish research work where opportunities arise. The RBS org deals with problems that are directly related to the selling partners and end customers and the ML team drives resolution to organization level problems. Therefore, the Applied Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
US, NJ, Newark
At Audible, we believe stories have the power to transform lives. It’s why we work with some of the world’s leading creators to produce and share audio storytelling with our millions of global listeners. We are dreamers and inventors who come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to empower and inspire each other. Imagine your future with us. ABOUT THIS ROLE We are seeking a data scientist builder to join the Audible economics team. Our group of economists, data scientists, and analysts tackles a wide range of questions, including pricing, experimentation science, data-driven product strategy/optimizations, internal productivity/incentives, audience science, and impact/ROI measurement. The ideal candidate will enjoy wearing many hats, possess an economist's mindset and a strong ability to effectively translate business questions into tractable quantitative frameworks, and excel at leveraging AI to build and scale robust, interpretable, and production-ready models/systems/tools. We're looking for someone who automates the repetitive, builds tools that force-multiply the team's output/influence, and treats AI as a core part of their workflow - not a side project. If you are passionate about leveraging data to shape the future of digital media, we encourage you to apply and be a part of our dynamic team. As a Data Scientist, you will... - Collaborate with economists, analysts, and other data scientists to build and scale econometric/ML models and quantitative tools - owning end-to-end scoping, data pipelining, feature engineering, model development/refinement, production-grade deployment, impact measurement, and adoption - Research and evaluate emerging tools and techniques (AI-driven and otherwise), and identify novel data sources to leverage in quantitative work – both from within Audible/Amazon and from 3P sources - Collaborate closely with Product, Content, and Marketing partners to drive broad impact and ensure that solutions are integrated into cross-functional workflows and executive decision-making - Represent the team in a range of settings - from reviews with senior Amazon scientists to reviews with senior Audible/Amazon business leaders - Mentor junior scientists and raise the bar for a new generation of scalable, AI-enabled science/analytical work, both within Audible and across the broader Amazon community ABOUT AUDIBLE Audible is the leading producer and provider of audio storytelling. We spark listeners’ imaginations, offering immersive, cinematic experiences full of inspiration and insight to enrich our customers daily lives. We are a global company with an entrepreneurial spirit. We are dreamers and inventors who are passionate about the positive impact Audible can make for our customers and our neighbors. This spirit courses throughout Audible, supporting a culture of creativity and inclusion built on our People Principles and our mission to build more equitable communities in the cities we call home. Key job responsibilities
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about giving customers the richest, most inspiring experience in their shopping journey? Do you like to dive deep to understand how customer-centric solutions drive measurable results? Do you enjoy working closely with the business and software engineers to design rigorous experiments, build the data infrastructure behind them, and translate results into decisions? You are in the right place! Come join our Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science (PRIMAS) team, where your work will directly impact millions of customers. The EU Marketing & Prime organization is looking for a Data Scientist to join the PRIMAS team. This role sits at the intersection of applied statistics and large-scale analytics — you'll design experiments and causal models, and also own the data pipelines, metrics, and reporting infrastructure that make those results usable across the business. The PRIMAS team provides a comprehensive understanding of customer segments, affinities, and lifetime value. We use data science tools and advanced statistical techniques to study customer purchase and engagement behaviors, and generate actionable insights on where, when, and how we deliver products and programs to customers. We help increase customer engagement, sales, and marketing efficiency, and our systems are built entirely in-house on automated large-scale analytics infrastructure. You will design, launch, and measure experiments across marketing channels (SEM/SEO, Affiliates, Display, Social, Mobile, Email, Onsite, etc.), engagement products, and customer segments. You will improve our understanding of customer behavior, run rigorous power and minimum detectable effect (MDE) analyses to size experiments correctly, and build the causal and conversion models that value and target our marketing — then build the pipelines and dashboards that keep those signals flowing reliably to stakeholders and downstream systems. You will work at the forefront of consumer analytics, tackling some of the hardest measurement problems in the industry alongside strong scientists, statisticians, and software engineers. Key job responsibilities 1. Design and implement scalable, statistically rigorous experiments (A/B, geo, holdout, quasi-experiments) to measure marketing incrementality across channels. 2. Perform power analysis and minimum detectable effect (MDE) calculations to determine experiment sample sizes, durations, and design trade-offs before launch. 3. Build causal and treatment-effect models that produce conversion and valuation signals consumed by downstream bidding and budgeting systems. 4. Building the ETL, metric definitions, and datasets that make results scalable, extensible, and repeatable rather than one-off analyses. 5. Develop measurement frameworks that quantify the true, platform-independent contribution of marketing over time, and build the dashboards and reporting that keep those metrics visible to the business. 6. Apply statistical, mathematical, and machine learning techniques to solve ambiguous business problems where the right approach isn't obvious. 7. Analyze experiment results for validity — inspecting distributions, checking for sample ratio mismatch, exploring covariate balance, and tracking down the source of anomalies. 8. Communicate experiment design, results, and trade-offs clearly to business and leadership audiences, including inputs into business reviews, and influence decisions and technical direction across teams. 9. Establish scalable, repeatable processes and best practices for experiment design, data modeling, and analysis.
US, WA, Seattle
We are looking for an Applied Scientist II to build the AI behind Auto Optimization: agentic systems that automatically optimize advertisers' campaigns on their behalf. Guided by an advertiser's standing instructions, these agents observe how a campaign is performing, reason about what to change, and act on it continuously as conditions in the marketplace shift. Optimizing a campaign well is a collection of decisions. It means working across every control an advertiser has at once: the keywords and products they target, the bids they set, the budgets they allocate, and where their ads appear, all aligned with the preferences of the advertiser. These choices are connected, since a change to targeting changes the right bid, and a change in bids changes how budget should be spent. You will build agents that make these decisions together rather than one lever at a time, and that adapt across many different campaign types and advertiser goals, from growing sales on established products to reaching new customers and launching new ones. Working backwards from the needs of millions of advertisers, you will solve ambiguous problems, invent new methods, and deliver them into a live product that manages real campaigns. You will stay deeply hands-on with the hardest technical problems, collaborate with product and engineering partners on approach, and help raise the quality of the team's science. Key job responsibilities - Build agentic systems that automatically optimize campaigns on an advertiser's behalf, working holistically across every control they have (targeting, bids, budgets, and placements) rather than one lever at a time, and generalizing across many campaign types and advertiser goals, from scaling a proven product to reaching new customers and launching something new. - Encode the dynamics of the auction and marketplace into how the agent reasons, balancing advertiser return, shopper experience, and marketplace health. - Turn raw signal into intelligence by defining and curating the datasets that train and evaluate these agents, from campaign and marketplace data to auction and bid/budget signals, impressions, clicks, conversions, and search-term performance. - Push the frontier of agent design, building the core of the agent itself: planning, tool use (for example, auction simulation, ML models, and optimization routines), and long-horizon reasoning across decisions that interact, and writing the production-quality, critical-path code that carries it from prototype to launch. - Set the bar for trust by developing the evaluation and safety methods that make it trustworthy to let an agent act on live campaigns and real budgets. - Grow with a team that grows the field: contribute to our scientific agenda, learn alongside strong scientists and engineers, and share your work with the broader 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 managing 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.