Author

Yang Liu

Applied Scientist

Latest news

US, CA, Palo Alto
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry leading 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. Amazon Ads Response Prediction team is your choice, if you want to join a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. We are seeking an experienced and motivated Machine Learning Applied Scientist who loves to innovate at the intersection of customer experience, deep learning, and high-scale machine-learning systems. Amazon Advertising operates at the intersection of eCommerce and advertising, and is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. We are defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products to improve both shopper and advertiser experience. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we grow at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. We are looking for a talented Machine Learning Applied Scientist for our Amazon Ads Response Prediction team to grow the business. We are providing advanced real-time machine learning services to connect shoppers with right ads on all platforms and surfaces worldwide. Through the deep understanding of both shoppers and products, we help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their customers, and helps Amazon continuously innovate on behalf of all customers. Key job responsibilities As a Machine Learning Applied Scientist, you will: * Conduct deep data analysis to derive insights to the business, and identify gaps and new opportunities * Develop scalable and effective machine-learning models and optimization strategies to solve business problems * Run regular A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis * Work closely with software engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions into production * Improve the scalability, efficiency and automation of large-scale data analytics, model training, deployment and serving * Conduct research on new machine-learning modeling to optimize all aspects of Sponsored Products and Brands business About the team We are pioneers in applying advanced machine learning and generative AI algorithms in Sponsored Products and Brands business. We empower every customer with a customized discovery experiences from back-end optimization (such as customized response prediction models) to front-end CX innovation (such as widgets), to help shoppers feel understood and shop efficiently on and off Amazon.
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through industry leading 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. Key job responsibilities We are looking for an Applied Science Manager to lead the Insights & Prompt Generation vertical within the Conversational Discovery Experiences (CAX) team in Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB). This team owns prompt generation, quality, personalization, and coverage for Sponsored Prompts, a new conversational ad format powered by large language models (LLMs) that helps shoppers discover products across Amazon.com. As an Applied Science Manager, you will lead a team of applied scientists and engineers to build and scale the prompt generation pipeline, develop new prompt themes and quality frameworks, and drive coverage expansion across all surfaces. You will own the science roadmap for prompt generation and personalization. You will define the metrics that measure prompt effectiveness and drive experimentation to improve CTR, helpfulness, and advertiser outcomes. This role requires strong technical depth in NLP, LLMs, and information retrieval, combined with the ability to manage and grow a science team, set research direction, and influence product strategy. You will work across organizational boundaries with engineering, product, and business teams to translate science investments into measurable business impact.
US, MA, Boston
MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLE Employer: AMAZON WEB SERVICES, INC. Offered Position: Data Scientist III Job Location: Boston, Massachusetts Job Number: AMZ9674163 Position Responsibilities: Own the data science elements of various products to help with data-based decision making, product performance optimization, and product performance tracking. Work directly with product managers to help drive the design of the product. Work with Technical Product Managers to help drive the build planning. Translate business problems and products into data requirements and metrics. Initiate the design, development, and implementation of scientific analysis projects or deliverables. Own the analysis, modelling, system design, and development of data science solutions for products. Write documents and make presentations that explain model/analysis results to the business. Bridge the degree of uncertainty in both problem definition and data scientific solution approaches. Build consensus on data, metrics, and analysis to drive business and system strategy. Position Requirements: Master's degree or foreign equivalent degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, Engineering, Computer Science or a related field and two years of experience in the job offered or a related occupation. Employer will accept a Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field and five years of progressive post-baccalaureate experience in the job offered or a related occupation as equivalent to the Master's degree and two years of experience. Must have one year of experience in the following skills: (1) building statistical models and machine learning models using large datasets from multiple resources; (2) building complex data analyses by leveraging scripting languages including Python, Java, or related scripting language; and (3) communicating with users, technical teams, and management to collect requirements, evaluate alternatives, and develop processes and tools to support the organization. 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 $161,803/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
US, WA, Seattle
MULTIPLE POSITIONS AVAILABLE Employer: AMAZON WEB SERVICES, INC. Offered Position: Research Scientist II Job Location: Seattle, Washington Job Number: AMZ9698004 Position Responsibilities: Perform and support the main psychometric aspects of exam development and operations, including but not limited to automated test assembly, item and test analyses, optimal item bank design, job task analysis, standard setting, quality assurance, and project planning. Conduct main aspects of psychometric analysis in operational work including performing item analysis using psychometric methods, building optimal test forms and pools via optimization techniques, analyzing and monitoring item bank health, setting pass standards via standard setting studies, and supporting Job Task Analysis (JTA) to define and refresh test blueprints. Conduct main aspects of psychometric analysis in developing and applying statistical and psychometric modeling to evaluate and ensure AWS certification exams’ validity, reliability, applicability, efficiency, and accuracy. Participate in research projects to improve existing operational processes and quality using advanced techniques such as Machine Learning (ML), statistical modeling, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), etc. Develop automation code using R or Python for psychometric workflow pipeline and other tasks to improve operational efficiencies. Present, interpret, and communicate the results of analyses to stakeholders through written and oral reports. Follow the accreditation standards set by ISO/IEC:2012 17024 and the National Council for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) as they relate to valid psychometric practices. Engage with the professional community through conferences and publications. Position Requirements: PhD or foreign equivalent degree in Statistics, Psychometrics, Educational Measurement, Quantitative Psychology, Data Science, Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology, or a related field and one year of research or work experience in the job offered, or as a Research Scientist, Research Assistant, Software Engineer, or a related occupation. Must have 1 year of experience in the following skill(s): 1. large-scale education, licensure, or certification assessment programs. 2. operational psychometric tasks on large-scale education, licensure, or certification assessment programs including item analysis, equating and scaling, item response theory, classical test theory, form and pool assembly, item bank health analysis, standard setting, and job task analysis. 3. at least one of the complex test designs such as linear-on-the-fly testing (LOFT), computerized adaptive testing (CAT). 4. at least one of the following areas including machine learning (ML) or natural language processing (NLP). 5. Programming skills in at least one script-based programming language (R, Python). 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 $136,000/year to $184,000/ 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
US, CA, Pasadena
The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing in Pasadena, CA, is looking to hire an Applied Scientist specializing in Testing of Control Systems hardware. Working alongside other scientists and engineers, you will validate hardware and software systems performing the control and readout functions for Amazon quantum processors. Working effectively within a cross-functional team environment is critical. The ideal candidate will have an established background in test engineering applicable to large mixed-signal systems. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship and Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Key job responsibilities Our scientists and engineers collaborate across diverse teams and projects to offer state of the art, cost effective solutions for the control of Amazon quantum processor systems. You’ll bring a passion for innovation and collaboration to: Develop automated test scripts for mid-volume electronics manufacturing, utilizing high-speed test equipment such as Gsps oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and network analyzers. Design and implement test plans for high-speed, mixed-signal PCAs and instrument assemblies, covering analog/digital interfaces, ADCs/DACs, FPGAs, and power distribution systems. Develop test requirements and coverage matrices with hardware and software stakeholders, including optimization of test coverage vs test time. Analyze test data to identify failure root causes and trends, implement corrective actions, and drive design-for-testability (DFT) enhancements. Drive continuous test improvement to improve test accuracy, improve final product reliability, and adapt to new measurement requirements.
US, WA, Seattle
WW Amazon Stores Finance Science (ASFS) works to leverage science and economics to drive improved financial results, foster data backed decisions, and embed science within Finance. ASFS is focused on developing products that empower controllership, improve business decisions and financial planning by understanding financial drivers, and innovate science capabilities for efficiency and scale. We are looking for a data scientist to lead high visibility initiatives for forecasting Amazon Stores' financials. You will develop new science-based forecasting methodologies and build scalable models to improve financial decision making and planning for senior leadership up to VP and SVP level. You will build new ML and statistical models from the ground up that aim to transform financial planning for Amazon Stores. We prize creative problem solvers with the ability to draw on an expansive methodological toolkit to transform financial decision-making with science. The ideal candidate combines data-science acumen with strong business judgment. You have versatile modeling skills and are comfortable owning and extracting insights from data. You are excited to learn from and alongside seasoned scientists, engineers, and business leaders. You are an excellent communicator and effectively translate technical findings into business action. Key job responsibilities Demonstrating thorough technical knowledge, effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard ML models Working with technical and non-technical stakeholders across every step of science project life cycle Collaborating with finance, product, data engineering, and software engineering teams to create production implementations for large-scale ML models Innovating by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures Presenting research results to our internal research community
US, WA, Seattle
This role will contribute to developing the Economics and Science products and services in the Fee domain, with specialization in supply chain systems and fees. Through the lens of economics, you will develop causal links for how Amazon, Sellers and Customers interact. You will be a key and senior scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to price our services. You will work on developing frameworks and scalable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policy in the two-sided marketplace that is central to Amazon's business. The pricing for Amazon services is complex. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Advertising, Supply Chain, Operations, Prime, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. We are looking for an experienced Economist to improve our understanding of seller Economics, enhance our ability to estimate the causal impact of fees, and work with partner teams to design pricing policy changes. In this role, you will provide guidance to scientists to develop econometric models to influence our fee pricing worldwide. You will lead the development of causal models to help isolate the impact of fee and policy changes from other business actions, using experiments when possible, or observational data when not. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. They will work closely with Economists, Data / Applied Scientists, Strategy Analysts, Data Engineers, and Product leads to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. Familiarity with systems and services that constitute seller supply chains is a plus but not required. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions Core Services organization, we're advancing the frontier of geospatial intelligence and AI-powered spatial reasoning. Our vision is to be the trusted foundation for transforming every business with Amazon AI teammates. Our mission is to deliver turnkey, enterprise-grade foundational AI capabilities that create delightful AI powered solutions. We're building sophisticated AI systems that enable intelligent agents to understand and operate effectively in the physical world through advanced geospatial optimization. Key job responsibilities - Develop geospatial optimization models that generalize across diverse customer use cases in logistics, transportation, and spatial planning - Scope optimization projects with multiple customers in mind, abstracting away complex science problems to create scalable solutions - Discover, evaluate, and adapt existing optimization models and geospatial tools for customer deployment - Develop semantic enrichment methods to integrate heterogeneous data sources including open geospatial data, multimodal sensor data, images, videos, satellite imagery, and documents - Research novel approaches combining AI agents with geospatial optimization to solve complex spatial problems - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate science components into production systems - Conduct rigorous experimentation and establish evaluation frameworks to measure solution performance A day in the life A day in the life As an Applied Scientist, you'll develop optimization algorithms and AI-powered geospatial solutions while maintaining a clear path to customer impact. You'll investigate novel approaches to spatial optimization, develop methods for semantic data enrichment, and validate ideas through rigorous experimentation with real customer data. You'll collaborate with other scientists and engineers to transform research insights into scalable solutions, work directly with enterprise customers to understand requirements, and help shape the future direction. Leveraging and advancing generative AI technology will be a big part of your charter. About the team Our Applied AI Solutions Core Services Science team is tackling fundamental challenges in geospatial optimization and AI-powered spatial reasoning. We're investigating novel approaches to how AI systems can solve complex logistics and transportation problems, reason about spatial relationships, and integrate diverse data sources to create enterprise-grade geospatial intelligence. Working at the intersection of optimization, large language models, and geospatial data science, we're developing practical techniques that advance the state-of-the-art in geospatial AI.
US, WA, Bellevue
We are looking for detail-oriented, organized, and responsible individuals who are eager to learn how to apply their causal inference and/or structural econometrics skillsets to solve real world problems. The intern will work in the area of Economics Intelligence in Amazon Returns and Recommerce Technology and Innovation and develop new, data-driven solutions to support the most critical components of this rapidly scaling team. Our PhD Economist Internship Program offers hands-on experience in applied economics, supported by mentorship, structured feedback, and professional development. Interns work on real business and research problems, building skills that prepare them for full-time economist roles at Amazon and beyond. You will learn how to build data sets and perform applied econometric analysis collaborating with economists, scientists, and product managers. These skills will translate well into writing applied chapters in your dissertation and provide you with work experience that may help you with placement. These are full-time positions at 40 hours per week, with compensation being awarded on an hourly basis. About the team The WWRR Economics Intelligence (RREI) team brings together Economists, Data Scientists, and Business Intelligence Engineers experts to delivers economic solutions focused on forecasting, causality, attribution, customer behavior for returns, recommerce, and sustainability domains.
US, CA, San Francisco
AWS is one of Amazon’s largest and fastest growing businesses, serving millions of customers in more than 190 countries. We use cloud computing to reshape the way global enterprises use information technology. We are looking for entrepreneurial, analytical, creative, flexible leaders to help us redefine the information technology industry. If you want to join a fast-paced, innovative team that is making history, this is the place for you. AWS Central Economics & Science (ACES) drives best practices for objectively applying economics and science in decision making across AWS. The team collaborates with AWS science and business teams to identify, frame, and analyze complex and ambiguous problems of the highest priority. Through data-driven insights and modeling, ACES supports strategic decision-making across the AWS global organization, including sales operations and business performance optimization. The ACES Sales Channels team is hiring an Applied Scientist (Senior or below) to advance our mission of providing rigorous, causal-inference-driven recommendations for AWS sales optimization. This role will focus on building ML systems with a causal modeling foundation, designing seller incentive mechanisms, and developing intervention strategies across the entire sales motion. Key job responsibilities • Causal ML System Development: Build and deploy machine learning models that emphasize causal inference, ensuring recommendations are grounded in valid interventions • Incentive Design: Define and model incentives that drive desirable behaviors across AWS sales channels, partner programs, and reseller ecosystems • Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with business stakeholders to understand requirements, validate approaches, and ensure practical applicability of scientific solutions • Scientific Rigor: Promote findings at internal conferences and contribute to the team's reputation for methodological excellence A day in the life The ACES Sales Channels team works on understanding and optimizing AWS's sales channels, both direct (generalist and specialist sellers) and indirect (partners and Marketplace). Our work falls into three core areas: developing rigorous causal measurement and modeling frameworks using cutting-edge economics and statistical methods; designing programs and incentives to improve customer and business outcomes; and building ML-based recommendation systems for sellers, partners, and other AWS stakeholders. About the team Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Hybrid Work We value innovation and recognize this sometimes requires uninterrupted time to focus on a build. We also value in-person collaboration and time spent face-to-face. Our team affords employees options to work in the office every day or in a flexible, hybrid work model near one of our U.S. Amazon offices.