Author

Jianhua Lu

Senior Manager, Applied Science

Latest news

US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Applied 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. Key job responsibilities - Develop interactive systems that leverage large language models, multimodal inputs and outputs, reinforcement learning from human feedback, or other advanced techniques to achieve fluid, engaging, and socially appropriate robot behavior - Design and implement intelligent conversational systems that handle turn-taking, grounding, interruption, and incorporates context drawn from a robot's physical environment and shared history with a user - Integrate perceptual sensor streams including gaze, facial expression, gesture, posture, and more to understand social context and produce coherent, lifelike interactions. - Develop memory and personalization systems that allow robots to form lasting relationships with individual users, learn their environments, and adapt their behavior over weeks and months - Stay updated on advancements in HRI, NLP, multimodal AI, and cognitive and social science to apply cutting-edge techniques to robot interaction challenges - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation
US, MA, N.reading
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic dexterous manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. At Amazonwe leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at an unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. Key job responsibilities - Collaborate with simulation and robotics experts to translate physical modeling needs into robust, scalable, and maintainable simulation solutions. - Design and implement high-performance simulation modeling and tools for rigid and deformable body simulation. - Identify and optimize performance bottlenecks in simulation pipelines to support real-time and batch simulation workflows. - Help build validation and unit testing pipelines to ensure correctness and physical fidelity of simulation results. - Identify potential sources of sim-to-real gaps and propose modeling and numerical approximations to reduce them. - Stay current with the latest advances in numerical methods, parallel computing, and GPU architectures, and incorporate them into our tools.
US, MA, North Reading
robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. At Amazon Industrial Robotics we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. We are pioneering the development of robotics foundation models that: Enable unprecedented generalization across diverse tasks Enable unprecedented robustness and reliability, industry-ready Integrate multi-modal learning capabilities (visual, tactile, linguistic) Accelerate skill acquisition through demonstration learning Enhance robotic perception and environmental understanding Streamline development processes through reusable capabilities The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. As an Applied Science Manager in the Foundation Model team, you will build and lead a team that develops and improves machine learning systems that help robots perceive, reason, and act in real-world environments. You will set the technical direction for leveraging state-of-the-art models (open source and internal research), evaluating them on representative tasks, and adapting/optimizing them to meet robustness, safety, and performance needs. You will drive the capability roadmap and the evaluation strategy that defines “what the robot brain can do,” and you will sponsor targeted innovation when gaps remain. You’ll collaborate closely with research, controls, hardware, and product teams, and ensure the team’s outputs can be further customized and deployed by downstream teams on specific robot embodiments.
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.
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.
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
Want to apply data science to one of Amazon's fastest-growing payment businesses, serving millions of sellers and buyers across 20+ global marketplaces? As a Data Scientist I on the cross-border payments science team, you will build and deploy production models that power real-time FX risk monitoring, generative AI seller chatbots, and multi-agent AI tools. You will work end-to-end—from problem framing through production deployment on AWS—delivering solutions that directly influence billion-dollar payment flows. This is a high-visibility, small-team environment where your work informs senior leadership decisions and creates measurable impact for customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities - Build, tune, and evaluate large language models and generative AI applications, including seller-facing chatbots and multi-agent AI tools for the cross-border payments business. - Develop and deploy real-time statistical and machine learning models for FX risk monitoring, validating your data, assumptions, and results throughout the process. - Gather and use large datasets from multiple sources across global marketplaces to design production-ready solutions that meet customer needs and team goals. - Write accurate, clear, and mathematically rigorous technical documents that communicate model performance and business impact to both technical and non-technical audiences. - Partner with engineering, business, and science teams to translate payment-domain problems into data science solutions and ensure smooth deployment on AWS. A day in the life You will spend your morning reviewing model outputs from production FX risk systems and tuning generative AI prototypes for seller chatbots. In the afternoon you might pair with an engineer to deploy a new model version on AWS, then present preliminary results to senior leadership. Throughout, you will seek feedback from senior scientists on your methodology and collaborate with cross-functional partners to refine problem framing. About the team We are the science team behind Amazon's cross-border payments business, supporting products that serve millions of sellers and buyers across 20+ global marketplaces. Our team is small and at an inflection point—we are expanding our generative AI capabilities, building multi-agent systems, and strengthening real-time risk models. You will join a group that values end-to-end ownership, from research to production, and whose work directly shapes decisions on large-scale payment flows.
US, WA, Seattle
Are you ready to revolutionize the future of aerial delivery? Join our pioneering team working on autonomous drone technology that will transform how Amazon delivers to customers. As a Manager III, Applied Science for our Perception team, you'll lead scientists and engineers building world-class machine learning models and computer vision and new frontier model based systems that enable drones to safely navigate complex environments. In this high-impact role, you'll guide the development of perception systems combining radar, machine learning, and distributed computing to solve unprecedented challenges in autonomous flight. Your work will directly shape the future of Amazon's drone delivery service, bringing innovative solutions to customers while pushing the boundaries of what's possible in autonomous systems technology. Key job responsibilities Lead and mentor a team of scientists and software engineers developing advanced perception systems that integrate computer vision, machine learning algorithms, and detect-and-avoid capabilities for autonomous drones Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for perception technology, making strategic architectural decisions that balance current delivery needs with long-term innovation goals Collaborate with cross-functional teams including hardware engineers, autonomy specialists, and product stakeholders to deliver scalable, distributed systems that meet rigorous safety and performance requirements Establish audit mechanisms and metrics to track system performance, model accuracy, and team progress against goals, using data-driven insights to continuously improve customer experience Build and grow an inclusive, high-performing team through effective hiring, mentoring, and career development while fostering a culture of innovation and technical excellence About the team The Perception team is at the heart of Amazon's autonomous drone delivery initiative, developing the advanced computer vision and machine learning systems that enable safe, reliable flight operations. Our team tackles fascinating challenges at the intersection of radar technology, distributed computing, and real-time detection algorithms, creating solutions that have never been built before. We work in an innovative, collaborative environment where every scientists and engineer's contribution directly impacts the future of delivery technology. As we scale Amazon's drone delivery to new locations, you'll help shape both the technical direction and team culture that will define this transformative service for years to come.
US, TX, Austin
Are You Ready to Redefine How the World Receives Its Packages? What if your algorithms defined the most efficient path for millions of deliveries — every single day? At Amazon, we're building the science that makes that possible, and we're looking for exceptional scientists to help lead the way. The Last Mile Routing & Planning organization develops the software, algorithms, and tools that power the "magic" of home delivery. Our planning and routing intelligence systems drive billions of daily decisions — enabling safe, efficient, and frustration-free routes for drivers across the globe. What You'll Do In this role, you'll sit at the intersection of state-of-the-art research and real-world impact. You will: - Design and build algorithms that solve large-scale, complex logistics problems - Synthesize data from diverse sources to identify high-value business opportunities - Provide research direction and data-driven insights to guide strategic decisions - Translate complex technical approaches into clear communication for scientists, engineers, and business stakeholders - Partner closely with scientists and engineers in a collaborative, high-impact environment What You'll Work On We have an exciting and growing portfolio of research areas, including: - Routing for same-day and grocery deliveries - Planning for electric and autonomous vehicles - District-level and stop-level planning - Forecasting solutions for diverse delivery programs All of this is powered by the latest methods in Operations Research (OR), Machine Learning (ML), and Generative AI — at a truly global scale. Successful candidates will lead one or more of these problem spaces. What We're Looking For - Deep expertise in Operations Research and/or Machine Learning methods - Proven experience applying these methods to large-scale, real-world business problems - Ability to translate models into production-ready code in Python or Java - Strong communication skills — you can explain complex technical concepts to diverse audiences - A bias for action and an iterative mindset when tackling ambitious research challenges Why Amazon We're passionate about your growth. Whether you want to explore emerging technologies, take on broader scope, or accelerate your career trajectory, we'll invest in helping you get there. Our business is scaling fast — and so are the opportunities for the people who build it. If you're driven by the challenge of optimizing one of the world's most complex logistics systems and excited to see your work impact millions of customers daily, we'd love to hear from you. Key job responsibilities - Invent and design novel solutions for scientifically complex problem areas, and identify opportunities for invention within existing and new business initiatives - Deliver large-scale, high-impact solutions to complex problems in support of medium-to-large business goals - Shape the design of scientifically complex software systems, personally contributing significant portions of the critical scientific novelty - Apply mathematical optimization, machine learning, and Generative AI techniques to develop solution methodologies for in-house decision support tools and software - Research, prototype, simulate, and experiment with models — and actively participate in their production-level deployment in Python or Java - Engage with the broader scientific community by publishing research articles and participating in leading research conferences
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are looking for a Senior Inference Engineer to own inference for real-time multimodal conversational AI. This is a full-stack inference role: you will work across the entire path a model takes from research to production — shaping model architecture so it is servable, building the real-time runtime that serves it within hard latency budgets, and building the offline systems that train and reinforce it. You will operate at the boundary of Science and Inference, taking frontier-scale speech and audio models and making them run within real-time latency budgets on production hardware. You will co-design architectures with scientists to make them inference-friendly from inception, own the low-latency streaming serving path, and build the training and reinforcement-learning infrastructure that closes the loop. You will have the compute, data, and runway to solve problems that few teams in the world are positioned to tackle. As a Senior Engineer, you will own a significant area of the inference stack end to end, drive its technical execution, contribute to the team's roadmap, and work closely with scientists and hardware partners to ensure our models run fast enough to feel human in real time — and at a cost that makes them viable at scale. You may go deep in one of the areas below while contributing across the others. Key job responsibilities Model Architecture & Inference Co-Design • Partner with research scientists to make model architectures servable from inception — surfacing the latency, memory, and cost implications of architecture choices before they are locked in • Implement and optimize the inference path for large-scale multimodal models — attention and KV-cache mechanisms, multimodal/autoregressive decoding, and the compute primitives on the critical path Apply efficiency techniques across the stack — quantization (per-tensor/per-channel/per- group, INT8/FP8/BF16), speculative decoding, operator fusion, and paged KV-cache — and quantify their quality/latency trade-offs • Develop and tune high-performance kernels for critical operations where off-the-shelf implementations leave performance on the table, integrating them into production serving with minimal overhead • Profile end-to-end performance with tools such as Nsight Compute/Systems and roofline analysis to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in large-scale inference workloads Real-Time & Interactive Runtime • Own the real-time serving path for streaming multimodal conversational AI, meeting sub- second, streaming latency budgets under concurrent session load • Build and tune continuous batching, scheduling, and preemption to balance throughput against per-request latency SLAs for interactive workloads • Customize production serving frameworks (e.g., vLLM, PyTorch) for real-time streaming generative models that fall outside standard LLM serving patterns — sustained low-latency output under concurrent session load • Implement multi-GPU inference (tensor parallelism, collective communication) for latency- critical paths, and drive cost toward parity with existing production baselines • Establish latency, throughput, and cost benchmarking, and publish the operational metrics that gate deployment Offline Systems: Training, RL & Evaluation Infrastructure • Build and scale the offline inference systems behind post-training — high-throughput rollout generation and reward-model serving for reinforcement learning (RL/RLHF/RLAIF) • Ensure train/serve consistency — that the inference path used in RL and evaluation faithfully matches production online behavior (e.g., parity across sampling and logit processing) • Work with the evaluation team to enable offline inference that captures the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation — latency sensitivity, audio quality, and interaction naturalness