Author

Zinan Mei

Manager, Data Science

Latest news

US, CA, Palo Alto
About Sponsored Products and Brands The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through 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. About our team SPB Ad 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 Applied Scientist with machine learning engineering background who loves to innovate at the intersection of customer experience, deep learning, and high-scale machine learning systems. We are looking for a talented Applied Scientist with a strong background in machine learning engineering to join our team and help us grow the business. In this role, you will partner with a team of engineers and scientists to build advanced machine learning models and infrastructure, from training to inference, including emerging LLM-based systems, that deliver highly relevant ads to shoppers across all Amazon platforms and surfaces worldwide. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will: * Develop scalable and effective machine learning models and optimization strategies to solve business problems. * Conduct research on new machine learning modeling to optimize all aspects of Sponsored Products business. * Enhance the scalability, automation, and efficiency of large-scale training and real-time inference systems. * Pioneer the development of LLM inference infrastructure to support next-generation GenAI workloads at Amazon Ads scale.
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Robotics/AI Motor Control Scientist to develop cutting-edge machine learning algorithms for motor control systems in robots. In this role, you will focus on creating and optimizing intelligent motor control strategies to enable robots to perform complex, whole-body tasks. Your contributions will be essential in advancing robotics by enabling fluid, reliable, and safe interactions between robots and their environments. Key job responsibilities - Develop controllers that leverage reinforcement learning, imitation learning, or other advanced AI techniques to achieve natural, robust, and adaptive motor behaviors - Collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams to integrate motor control systems with robotic hardware, ensuring alignment with real-world constraints such as actuator dynamics and energy efficiency - Use simulation and real-world testing to refine and validate control algorithms - Stay updated on advancements in robotics, AI, and control systems to apply advanced techniques to robotic motion challenges - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation 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. 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.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon’s customers? Do you want to build and deploy advanced ML systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real-world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Machine Learning team for India Consumer Businesses. Machine Learning, Big Data and related quantitative sciences have been strategic to Amazon from the early years. Amazon has been a pioneer in areas such as recommendation engines, ecommerce fraud detection and large-scale optimization of fulfillment center operations. As Amazon has rapidly grown and diversified, the opportunity for applying machine learning has exploded. We have a very broad collection of practical problems where machine learning systems can dramatically improve the customer experience, reduce cost, and drive speed and automation. These include product bundle recommendations for millions of products, safeguarding financial transactions across by building the risk models, improving catalog quality via extracting product attribute values from structured/unstructured data for millions of products, enhancing address quality by powering customer suggestions We are developing state-of-the-art machine learning solutions to accelerate the Amazon India growth story. Amazon India is an exciting place to be at for a machine learning practitioner. We have the eagerness of a fresh startup to absorb machine learning solutions, and the scale of a mature firm to help support their development at the same time. As part of the India Machine Learning team, you will get to work alongside brilliant minds motivated to solve real-world machine learning problems that make a difference to millions of our customers. We encourage thought leadership and blue ocean thinking in ML. Key job responsibilities Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes Design, develop, evaluate and deploy, innovative and highly scalable ML models Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations Work closely with business partners to identify problems and propose machine learning solutions Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model maintenance Work proactively with engineering teams and product managers to evangelize new algorithms and drive the implementation of large-scale complex ML models in production Leading projects and mentoring other scientists, engineers in the use of ML techniques About the team International Machine Learning Team is responsible for building novel ML solutions that attack India first (and other Emerging Markets across MENA and LatAm) problems and impact the bottom-line and top-line of India business. Learn more about our team from https://www.amazon.science/working-at-amazon/how-rajeev-rastogis-machine-learning-team-in-india-develops-innovations-for-customers-worldwide
GB, London
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.
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Sr. Applied Scientist to develop and optimize Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) and sensor fusion systems for our intelligent robots. In this role, you will design, implement, and deploy state estimation and tracking algorithms that enable robots to understand their position and motion in real time, even in challenging and dynamic environments. You will own the full pipeline from algorithm development through embedded deployment, ensuring that perception systems run efficiently on resource-constrained robotic hardware. You will also leverage modern machine learning approaches to push the boundaries of classical perception methods, combining learned representations with geometric techniques to achieve robust, real-time performance. This is a deeply hands-on role. You will work directly with sensors, hardware, and real-world data, while prototyping, testing, and iterating in physical environments. The ideal candidate has strong foundations in VIO and sensor fusion, practical experience optimizing algorithms for embedded platforms, and familiarity with how modern deep learning is transforming perception. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement Visual Inertial Odometry algorithms for robust real-time state estimation on robotic platforms like Sprout - Develop multi-sensor fusion pipelines integrating cameras, IMUs, and other sensing modalities for accurate pose tracking - Optimize perception and tracking algorithms for deployment on embedded hardware (e.g., ARM, GPU-accelerated edge devices) under strict latency and power constraints - Apply modern ML-based perception techniques (learned features, depth estimation, neural odometry) to complement and improve classical geometric approaches - Build and maintain calibration, evaluation, and benchmarking infrastructure for perception systems - Collaborate with hardware, controls, and navigation teams to integrate perception outputs into the robot’s autonomy stack - Lead technical projects from research prototyping through production deployment
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking an Applied Scientist II to work on development of an AI-based data intelligence and classification platform that will redefine how security and privacy assessments and enforcement are conducted at scale. This mission-critical platform will leverage AI-driven autonomous agents to conduct proactive, intelligent security operations across the company. The platform will integrate deeply with internal security, privacy, engineering, and cloud-native tools to provide self-serve, automated insights, verifications, and enforcement mechanisms. This role requires strong technical expertise in AI/ML, LLMs, and distributed cloud infrastructure, as well as thought leadership to drive alignment across multiple teams, customers, and business units. This is an opportunity to shape the future of AI-driven security and privacy assurance at an enterprise scale, defining standards, influencing company-wide security posture, and leading technical innovation at the highest level. Key job responsibilities * Architect and define the next-generation data classification and search matching platform, leading the technical strategy for AI-driven security automation across applied science and engineering teams * Build on multi-agent LLM framework, and influence your organizations in adopting the promising approaches * Develop a highly scalable, traditional ML-based as well as LLM-based intelligent security agent framework that enables internal teams to automate processing of structured and unstructured data * Combine depth and breadth of domain expertise and provide technical leadership to the entire team while also doing hands-on work by diving deep into details to diagnose complex system performance problems. About the team The Data Categorization team helps Amazonians understand their data and govern it at scale and ensures experiences delivered by Amazon to our customers uphold our high security and privacy standards. The science team harnesses AI to strengthen Amazon’s privacy and security posture more efficiently and effectively.
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Are you excited about developing state-of-the-art Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning and Computer Vision algorithms and designs using large data sets to solve real world problems? Do you have proven analytical capabilities and can multi-task and thrive in a fast-paced environment? Do you want to build a foundation for your career after your Master's or Ph.D program at an industry-leading company? You enjoy the prospect of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, have not been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, you’ll get opportunities to be a disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables machine learning to create significant impacts. As an Applied Scientist, you will bring statistical modeling and machine learning advancements to data analytics for customer-facing solutions in complex industrial settings. You will be working in a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary team of researchers who are leaders in the field. You will take on challenging problems, distill real requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research, or utilize your own out-of-the-box pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you may even need to deliver these to production in customer facing products
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 to help enhance and scale our support agent capabilities. You will build and improve models that power advertiser-facing interactions, contribute to our evaluation framework, and work alongside senior scientists and engineers to ship science into production. A day in the life 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 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. The team is cross-functional — scientists and engineers work shoulder-to-shoulder, from problem framing through production deployment.
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon's PRISM team is seeking an innovative Applied Scientist to build the intelligence layer powering the Catalog Diagnostic Assistant — a conversational AI agent that unifies Amazon's fragmented catalog diagnostic experience into a single natural-language interface. Rather than switching between legacy tools, internal users ask CDA a question in plain language and CDA coordinates across data sources, reasons through complex diagnostic workflows, and returns a combined answer with source citations. This role sits at the intersection of Generative AI, agentic architectures, and large-scale information retrieval applied to the world's largest product catalog. You will design and build the scientific core of an agent that autonomously investigates catalog anomalies — diagnosing why products aren't live, why attributes aren't publishing, or why matching decisions went wrong — across billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, and dozens of marketplaces. You will be the founding scientist for the CDA product, defining the research agenda for agentic diagnostics, developing novel approaches to skill-based reasoning and tool orchestration, and owning the full lifecycle from problem formulation through production deployment at Amazon scale. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog and tackle problems at the frontier of AI research. Key job responsibilities - Formulate open research problems at the intersection of GenAI, agentic reasoning, and large-scale catalog diagnostics — defining how an autonomous agent should decompose, investigate, and explain complex catalog issues - Design and develop novel agentic architectures (skill planning, tool selection, multi-step reasoning, chain-of-thought verification) that enable CDA to autonomously resolve diagnostic workflows that traditionally required manual expert investigation - Build and optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems over Amazon's catalog data, ensuring the agent retrieves the right evidence from the right data sources to ground its diagnostic answers - Advance the science of efficient model deployment — developing distillation, compression, and LLM serving optimization strategies that preserve diagnostic reasoning quality in production-grade architectures while reducing latency and cost - Make frontier models reliable for autonomous decisions — advancing uncertainty calibration, confidence estimation, and interpretability methods so CDA's agentic diagnoses can be trusted at scale - Own the full research lifecycle from problem formulation through production deployment — designing rigorous experiments, iterating rapidly, and seeing your research directly improve diagnostic accuracy and coverage - Partner closely with CDA engineers to translate research prototypes into production systems serving thousands of daily diagnostic sessions - Shape the team's research vision by defining technical roadmaps that balance foundational scientific inquiry with measurable product impact - Mentor engineers on advanced ML/GenAI techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor About the team We are a GenAI science team within Amazon's Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS) organization. Our mission is to advance state-of-the-art Generative AI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and intelligently diagnose every product at Amazon scale. We push the boundaries of multimodal LLMs, agentic systems, and generative AI to solve foundational catalog challenges — from product identity and semantic matching to automated catalog diagnostics and intelligent catalog analytics. Our scientists work across multiple high-impact problem spaces: establishing canonical product identity across billions of items, powering next-generation agentic experiences for catalog operations, and building AI systems that make Amazon's catalog self-diagnosing and self-healing. We operate at the frontier of AI research applied at unprecedented scale — petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity. This is a collaborative, fast-moving 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 ideas at scale, and publish your findings at top venues.
US, WA, Seattle
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join a science team within Amazon Customer Service that is reimagining how customers are connected with the right support experience. This is a role at the intersection of representation learning, behavioral modeling, and large-scale experimentation where you will see your science deployed in production systems serving real-time decisions. Key job responsibilities - Develop machine learning models that capture how service associates perform across different problem types and how their capabilities evolve over time - Power intelligent routing decisions across hundreds of millions of annual customer contacts - Directly improve both customer experience and associate satisfaction through model-driven decisions - Work at the intersection of representation learning, behavioral modeling, and large-scale experimentation - Deploy science into production systems serving real-time decisions