Michael McPhillips

Applied Scientist, AWS Automated Reasoning

US, WA, Seattle

Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning are dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for automated reasoning, privacy, and sovereignty. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will: - Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation. - Own strategic problem solving, and take the lead on the design, implementation, and delivery for solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact. - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. - Develop strategic plans to identify fundamentally new solutions for business problems. - Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues. A day in the life This is a unique and rare opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a large business and customer impact. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Automated Reasoning values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the 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 Amazon Automated Reasoning? At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for automated reasoning across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented automated reasoning professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Automated Reasoning, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest automated reasoning challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & 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, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. 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 flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there's nothing we can't achieve.

Sr. Applied Scientist, AWS Automated Reasoning

US, WA, Seattle

Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning are dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for automated reasoning, privacy, and sovereignty. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will: - Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation. - Own strategic problem solving, and take the lead on the design, implementation, and delivery for solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact. - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. - Develop strategic plans to identify fundamentally new solutions for business problems. - Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues. A day in the life This is a unique and rare opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a large business and customer impact. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Automated Reasoning values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the 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 Amazon Automated Reasoning? At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for automated reasoning across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented automated reasoning professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Automated Reasoning, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest automated reasoning challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & 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, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. 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 flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there's nothing we can't achieve.

Applied Scientist, Fauna

US, CA, Sunnyvale

We are seeking an Applied Scientist to focus on Robotics Spatial Intelligence and Semantic Understanding. In this role, you'll research and build advanced semantic and world understanding algorithms that enable robots to observe, understand, and reason about complex and dynamic home environments. You'll work across a broad spectrum of 3D perception, contextual understanding, and world modeling approaches to build robust solutions that support autonomous decision making, task planning, navigation, and manipulation. Key job responsibilities - Develop and implement robust World Understanding and Modeling algorithms for a domestic robot. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic evaluation of Our Spatial Intelligence stack. - Conduct sim-to-real transfer experiments, analyzing performance gaps and developing techniques to ensure reliable real-world performance. - Collaborate with navigation, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of World Understanding capabilities. - Stay current with the latest advances in World Modeling, Spatial Reasoning, and related fields and apply relevant findings to improve system performance About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.

Data Scientist II, Rapid & Rural Logistics (R2L) Science & AI

US, WA, Bellevue

The R2L team is responsible for building the next generation supply chain for Amazon’s world-class ultra-fast customer experiences including Amazon Fresh groceries, Sub-Same Day, Amazon Now, and other soon-to-launch exciting new businesses. Join us and you'll be taking part in serving our customers in as fast as 30 minutes! R2L Science & AI team sits under R2L and is a central team for all Data Science/AI related asks. We are looking for an experienced and curious data scientist with effective superior analytical skills to inform the data science charter of the team. Key job responsibilities We are looking for an experienced and curious data scientist with effective superior analytical skills to inform the data science charter of the team. This position is critical in helping us learn more about our data and finding opportunities to delight customers with data driven insights and machine learning models. The Data Science and Analytics team owns data science, data engineering, and business intelligence. You will be supporting multiple business and technical stakeholders with high velocity analytics. This role is uniquely positioned in the team as we have a growing need for looking around corners, prioritizing opportunities using data driven insights, and finding solutions to these opportunities using different machine learning techniques and causal inference models. You will be diving deep in our data and have a strong bias for action to quickly produce high quality data analyses with clear findings and recommendations. As part of our journey to learn about our data, some opportunities may be a dead end and you will be balancing unknowns with delivering results for our customers. 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! Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan Learn more about our benefits here: https://amazon.jobs/en/internal/benefits/us-benefits-and-stock

Airspace Management Simulation Applied Scientist, Prime Air Flight Sciences High Fidelity Methods

US, WA, Seattle

Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of diversity and inclusion of our teams within the organization. How do you get items to customers quickly, cost-effectively, and—most importantly—safely, in less than an hour? And how do you do it in a way that can scale? Our teams of hundreds of scientists, engineers, aerospace professionals, and futurists have been working hard to do just that! We are delivering to customers, and are excited for what’s to come. Check out more information about Prime Air on the About Amazon blog (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-prime-air-delivery-drone-reveal-photos). If you are seeking an iterative environment where you can drive innovation, apply state-of-the-art technologies to solve real world delivery challenges, and provide benefits to customers, Prime Air is the place for you. Come work on the Amazon Prime Air Team! We're looking for a Research Scientist with a background in developing simulations for traffic management algorithms, including expert knowledge in strategic deconfliction, tactical deconfliction, or detect-and-avoid systems. Managing a large number of concurrent autonomous drone flights that share airspace with other autonomous or manned aircraft is a challenging problem. Be part of the team building simulation tools and algorithms to solve this at scale. This role will contribute to a portfolio of simulation tools managing concurrent airspace traffic for aviation systems. This will include developing new methodologies in the areas of conflict detection and resolution, as well as developing related software systems that will be used in operation to enable package delivery at scale. The ideal candidate is comfortable with risk-taking and ambiguity and able to build consensus on critical, controversial technical decisions. If you enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before, Prime Air is right for you. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver and directly impact Amazon’s customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities The primary focus of this role will be on modeling traffic management frameworks that use a layered conflict detection and resolution strategy to ensure safe and efficient flight operations. This will include developing fundamental simulation infrastructure code, including discrete event simulation tooling. In addition, it will involve developing expert knowledge of the layers of mitigation and conducting in-depth scientific research on alternative solutions for conflict resolution. The candidate will contribute to significant and impactful systems that will provide value for Amazon customers and will drive these projects from the concept stage through development. This role will include substantial software development in prototyping and production environments.

Applied Scientist II, Alexa Ads

IN, KA, Bengaluru

Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers, and is becoming the conversational AI interface for Amazon services with the launch of Alexa for Shopping on Amazon.com and Amazon mobile app. At Alexa Ads, we are creating industry's first and most advanced Agentic Advertising products to drive Agentic Commerce. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Agentic/Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and evaluate innovative machine learning and deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. - Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. - Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. - Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments. About the team We are building a new science team in Bangalore to solve some of the most impactful problems in computational advertising. This isn't about tweaking existing models as we are rethinking how ads are ranked, priced, and personalized across voice-first and screen-first surfaces. These are problems that don't have textbook solutions. Key points to note about the team: 🧪 Greenfield team - you are not joining a mature org with rigid processes. You will shape the science roadmap, pick the problems, and define the culture from day one. 📈 Direct business impact — your models directly drive revenue. No yearly cycles to see if your work matters. 🌏 Global scope, local autonomy — collaborate with scientists and engineers across Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Bangalore, but own your problem space end-to-end. 🎓 Ship AND Publish: We encourage top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICML, WWW) while ensuring your research hits production.

Applied scientist, Agentic AI, AWS Agentic AI

IL, Tel Aviv

Come join the AWS Agentic AI science team in building the next generation models for intelligent automation. AWS, the world-leading provider of cloud services, has fostered the creation and growth of countless new businesses, and is a positive force for good. Our customers bring problems that will give Applied Scientists like you endless opportunities to see your research have a positive and immediate impact in the world. You will have the opportunity to partner with technology and business teams to solve real-world problems, have access to virtually endless data and computational resources, and to world-class engineers and developers that can help bring your ideas into the world. As part of the team, we expect that you will develop innovative solutions to hard problems, and publish your findings at peer reviewed conferences and workshops. We are looking for world class researchers with experience in one or more of the following areas - autonomous agents, API orchestration, Planning, large multimodal models (especially vision-language models), reinforcement learning (RL) and sequential decision making.

Sr Applied Scientist, Support Agent Intelligence and Evaluation

US, WA, Seattle

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Millions of advertisers rely on Amazon's self-service support experience to resolve issues, unblock campaigns, and grow their business. Our Support Agents team is building the science behind intelligent, conversational support — systems that understand advertiser intent, retrieve the right knowledge, generate accurate answers, and know when to escalate. We serve ~2M monthly active advertisers across dozens of locales and languages, and every percentage point of improvement in resolution quality translates directly into advertiser success and retention. We are seeking an Applied Scientist who is passionate about building evaluation science, NLP systems, and quality measurement at scale. You will define how we measure "good" — designing LLM-as-a-judge evaluation pipelines, developing our next-generation Issue Resolution Rate (IRR) metrics, and closing the quality gap between English and non-English markets. Your work will directly shape what ships to advertisers and what leadership uses to assess the health of our support experience. Key job responsibilities 1. Enhance support agent capabilities across the broad suite of Amazon Advertising products — expanding coverage, depth of resolution, and advertiser task completion across Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, DSP, AMC, and more 2. Design and own the evaluation framework for agent quality — including automated LLM-based scoring of answer correctness, confidence calibration, and conversation-level resolution signals 3. Develop novel metrics that capture whether advertisers actually got the help they needed (beyond surface-level deflection rates) 4. Build and improve retrieval and generation models that power real-time advertiser interactions under strict latency SLAs 5. Drive multilingual science — improve non-English resolution rates through cross-lingual retrieval, translation quality modeling, and locale-aware evaluation 6. Partner with product, engineering, and business teams to productize research and inform roadmap decisions with data A day in the life You might start the morning reviewing overnight evaluation results from your LLM-as-a-judge pipeline, then jump into a whiteboard session designing a new resolution metric that captures whether advertisers actually unblocked their campaign. After lunch you're running offline experiments on a cross-lingual retrieval model to close the quality gap for non-English markets, and by end of day you're syncing with engineering on latency trade-offs for next week's A/B test. The constant: your science directly changes the experience millions of advertisers have when they need help. About the team This role sits within Amazon Advertising's broader Agentic Intelligence organization — a community of multiple Applied Science and Engineering teams building the next generation of AI-powered experiences for advertisers. You'll have access to Principal Engineers and Principal Applied Scientists to pressure-test ideas and elevate your work. What makes this team unique is the balance: you'll drive product-facing science through customer support agents that touch millions of advertisers, while also influencing and collaborating with a core AI infrastructure team within Amazon. The team is cross-functional — scientists and engineers work shoulder-to-shoulder, from problem framing through production deployment.

Research Scientist III - AMZ10061595

US, WA, Seattle

MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLE Employer: AMAZON DEVELOPMENT CENTER U.S., INC. Offered Position: Research Scientist III Job Location: Seattle, Washington Job Number: AMZ10061595 Position Responsibilities: Develop and apply state of the art machine learning methods to large, multi source datasets to build and implement risk prevention, detection and mitigation solutions. Contribute to the development of ML Ops infrastructure, as well as the creation and delivery of Amazon’s science roadmap, including Gen AI efforts. Work closely with software engineering teams to deploy innovations. Mentor and coach junior scientists, including through lunch-and-learn sessions, tech talks, and regular office hours. Publish insights in and champion industry best practices at internal and external journals and conferences. Position Requirements: Master’s degree or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field and three years of experience in the job offered or a related occupation. Employer will accept a bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field and five years of progressive postbaccalaureate experience in the job offered or a related occupation as equivalent to a master’s degree and three years of experience. Must have three years of experience in the following skill(s): (1) conducting research in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, or a related functionality, and publishing findings; (2) building machine learning models including generative models for business applications, and (3) programming in Java, C++, Python or related language. Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation. 40 hours / week, 8:00am-5:00pm, Salary Range $164,955/year to $215,300/year. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, visit: https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits#0000

Applied Scientist, Special Projects

US, WA, Seattle

Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the limits. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. As an Applied Scientist on our team, you will focus on building state-of-the-art ML models for biology. Our team rewards curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing products to market. Competitive candidates are responsive, flexible, and able to succeed within an open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, startup-like environment. At the forefront of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with a diverse and talented team of scientists, engineers, and product managers and collaborate with other teams.

Michael McPhillips

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