Social
A child sits in a chair at a kitchen counter, wearing headphones while watching a Fire tablet
As children spend more hours in front of screens, it is increasingly important to investigate the effects of digital technology. Boston Children’s Hospital launched the Digital Wellness Lab, a research center providing science-based recommendations for parents and caretakers.

Amazon Kids links up with Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab

Science-based recommendations from the Digital Wellness Lab could inform the development of digital products that help children.

By Mariana Lenharo
May 24, 2021
6 min read
Share

Parents worldwide are confronted with a similar question: What is the impact of screen time in the lives of their children?

As children spend more hours in front of screens, it becomes increasingly important to investigate the effects of digital technology on their brains, bodies, and behaviors.

To assist that effort, experts at Boston Children’s Hospital recently launched the Digital Wellness Lab, a research center providing practical, science-based recommendations for parents and caretakers on how to raise healthy children in the digital age.

Amazon Kids, one of the supporters of the initiative, provides free tools for parents to make choices about how their children interact with devices such as Amazon Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, Echo smart speakers, and Fire TV.

The team says it hopes to utilize Digital Wellness Lab research as it continues to develop new products that help children explore quality content online while informing and empowering parents.

Officially launched in March, the Digital Wellness Lab is an evolution of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital, which had been investigating the impact of media use on children’s mental and physical health for almost 20 years.

Michael Rich and David Bickham
Michael Rich, left, is the founder and director of the Digital Wellness Lab. David Bickham, right, is the lab's research scientist lead.
Glynis Condon

For the past couple of decades, the amount and the quality of research in this field has increased significantly, but its results remained mostly restricted to academia.

“It struck me that, no matter how wonderful our research was, until we got it into the hands of the people who could actually change the digital environment, we were going to be spinning our wheels,” said pediatrician Michael Rich, the lab’s founder and director.

He notes that while the tech industry is highly competitive, this is a topic where companies are collaborating to address the common concern over impact of technology on children. The Digital Wellness Lab originated from the idea that, by working together with industry, science could foster real change in devices, platforms, and software in ways to promote the wellness of individuals and society.

Amazon Kids’ support for science

Karen Ressmeyer, Amazon Kids director of Family Trust, describes the alliance with the Digital Wellness Lab as a win-win situation.

“This collaboration provides us with new insights and data from the lab to help our mission of contributing to a positive digital environment,” she said.

The goal of Amazon Kids and Amazon Kids+ — a subscription service providing access to thousands of books, movies, TV shows, and educational curated content — is to give children the freedom to explore high-quality content in a kid-friendly environment within parameters set by their parents or caretakers.

Karen Ressmeyer, left, is Amazon Kids director of Family Trust. Catherine Teitelbaum, right,
Karen Ressmeyer, left, is Amazon Kids director of Family Trust. Catherine Teitelbaum, right, is principal, Family Trust at Amazon Kids.
Glynis Condon

Working with the Digital Wellness Lab furthers that goal in a unique fashion, according to Catherine Teitelbaum, principal, Family Trust at Amazon Kids. “With this partnership we are intentionally creating a forum to discuss ideas of all sizes and learn from researchers, academics, and clinicians as we look to constantly strengthen our commitment to the wellness of kids and families,” she said.

While tech companies like Amazon can conduct research on their own to address concerns about the impact of technology on children’s mental health, this arrangement offers the ability to develop fundamental research that is completely independent and agnostic to outcomes, noted Rich.

“Our goal is to offer a resource that can inform both sides of the paradigm — the producers and the consumers — to move what they create and what they consume toward a better place in terms of physical, mental and social health,” he said.

Investigating how technology affects children

At the moment, one of the main research questions related to wellness and technology is how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the use of technology by children.

One of the first efforts by the Digital Wellness Lab was a national survey with parents of children from kindergarten to grade 12 that showed as kids’ media use increased during the pandemic, so did the frequency of arguments with their parents over that usage. However, the survey found that spike did not owe purely to kids streaming videos.

“We also found that over 70% of children were using these devices to connect with their family and their friends, and this was true across all age groups,” said David Bickham, research scientist lead at the Digital Wellness Lab. When asked if media use was helpful or hurtful for their children, more than half of the parents said it was helpful for their social relationships and educational achievements.

That more nuanced understanding is a departure from the historically high degree of polarization around this topic, Rich observed. “You were either for kids or for screens, but you couldn't be for both,” he said. Having had an earlier career as a screenwriter and filmmaker – which included working as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa in Japan – he knew that people who were making media were not out to hurt kids.

Bickham noted that, rather than trying to label whether media use is fundamentally good or bad, the lab is trying to identify these types of nuances.

Open research questions

Historically, this field of research hasn’t determined clear causal relationships between types of screen use and mental and physical health outcomes, which constitutes an important gap, according to Rich.

What we want to do is start to move from correlations to understanding what type of screen use contributes to which outcomes.
Michael Rich

“For example, we don't know whether playing violent video games makes kids more violent, or whether more violent kids are drawn to violent video games,” he explained. “We just see correlations, and what we want to do is start to move from correlations to understanding what type of screen use contributes to which outcomes.”

The way to get there, notes Rich, is through long-term longitudinal studies, a type of research that follows the subjects for several years and collects data on different variables periodically. The Digital Wellness Lab has a project to do exactly that. The Growing Up Digital project is a 10-year longitudinal study that plans to have at least one site in each of the six populated continents.

“We are going to follow two cohorts of children, from preschool to middle school, and from middle school to young adulthood, on an annual basis measuring in a deep way not just the screens they are actively using, but also those they are ambiently exposed to,” Rich noted.

The study will measure several outcomes related to learning, mental health, and physical health, such as sleep, exercise and nutrition.

The program is already underway in Australia and Canada, and the group is having conversations with institutions from countries like India and Brazil to set up the study in those geographies as well.

bchimage.png
The Digital Wellness Lab is an evolution of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children's Hospital.
Courtesy of Boston Children's Hospital

The lab also hopes to look at how the use of technology differs across cultures. Previous work by the group looked into digital media usage and play in young children from the United States and Mexico. While, in the U.S., “media use may have displaced time dedicated to certain types of play,” the opposite was true in Mexico: “play seemed to facilitate or positively co-occur with media use.”

“When you think about not just the amount of time spent with screens, but the characteristics of technology use and cultural differences, you start to reveal a more nuanced understanding of how technology impacts kids and their development,” Bickham said.

According to Rich, researchers in this field are coming to realize that it's not about the total duration of screen use, but what we are doing on the screens and the context in which we are doing it. In order to empower families to evaluate what type of technology use is healthy for their children, the lab recently published the Family Digital Wellness Guide, which gives science-based practical advice on the topic for parents and caretakers.

Empowering families is also one of the main goals of Amazon Kids.

“That is so closely tied with our focus at Amazon Kids,” said Teitelbaum, “where we have a long history of building not just products that are safe for kids and designed for kids, but engaging with parents through our parent dashboard, providing them choices to shape their children’s use of media.”

Tags
About the Author
Mariana Lenharo
Mariana is a science and health journalist based in Brazil.

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Connect
US, NY, New York
Are you excited about applying machine learning and statistical modeling to real-world systems that serve millions of customers? Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that helps businesses deliver personal, efficient customer experiences. Our team of scientists and engineers builds the AI and ML capabilities that power contact center operations and optimization. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to tackle scientifically complex challenges in areas such as stochastic modeling, queueing theory, anomaly detection, and optimization. In this role, you will design and deploy novel ML models and algorithms that directly improve how businesses interact with their customers. You will work at the intersection of research and production, turning ambiguous problems into scalable solutions that shape the future of cloud-based customer service. Key job responsibilities - Design and deploy novel machine learning models and algorithms to solve complex problems in contact center operations, including forecasting, routing optimization, and anomaly detection. - Lead the scientific agenda for your team by identifying new research opportunities, proposing initiatives, and driving them from concept through production deployment. - Collaborate with engineering teams to architect and implement scalable ML systems, personally contributing significant portions of the critical scientific components. - Mentor fellow scientists and engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and scientific guidance, raising the overall technical bar of the team. - Evaluate and advance the team's ML methodology by benchmarking against current academic and industry research, and by publishing findings internally and externally when appropriate. A day in the life You might start your morning reviewing experiment results from a new forecasting model, then join a design session with engineers to discuss how to integrate it into the production pipeline. After lunch, you could be whiteboarding a novel approach to a queueing optimization problem with a fellow scientist, followed by a code review for a teammate. You will regularly present your research findings to stakeholders across the organization and contribute to the team's publication efforts. About the team Our team within Amazon Connect focuses on building intelligent, ML-driven capabilities that help businesses run their contact centers more effectively. We work closely with product, engineering, and science partners to turn research ideas into features that customers rely on every day. We value curiosity, collaboration, and scientific rigor, and we are investing in new AI capabilities that will continue to transform the customer service industry. If you want to see your research make a tangible impact at scale, this is the place to do it.
Applied Scientist I, Amazon Shipping
IN, HR, Gurugram
Building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. Key job responsibilities 1. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 2. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. 3. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 4 Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 5. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing.
Applied Scientist, Customer360
US, WA, Seattle
What happens when you give AI the ability to remember? Not cached responses — real structured memory that compounds over time and transfers across contexts. We're building the science behind this, and we need researchers who want to own the problem end-to-end. This is a founding role on a new team. You won't inherit models or maintain someone else's pipeline. You'll define the research direction, run experiments at scale, and ship what works directly to production. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in our team, you will be responsible for the research, design, and development of new AI technologies for knowledge acquisition and retrieval. You will adopt or invent new machine learning and analytical techniques in the realm of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and large language models. Specific responsibilities include: 1. Design and implement novel approaches to knowledge extraction from heterogeneous, unstructured data sources at organizational scale. 2. Build retrieval systems that match intent to relevant knowledge across domains — solving the "right memory at the right time" problem. 3. Own the quality of memory generation: what to capture, how to structure it, when to surface it, and when to let it decay. 4. Run large-scale experiments using Amazon's compute infrastructure and massive real-world datasets. 5. Develop evaluation frameworks for a system where "quality" means something new — right knowledge, right context, right confidence level. 6. Collaborate with engineers to move from research prototype to production system in weeks, not quarters. 7. Invent new approaches to temporal knowledge management — how memories age, conflict, and compound over time. 8. Publish and patent novel approaches to knowledge acquisition and retrieval at top-tier venues. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate insights and opportunities, execute experiments, and develop statistical and ML models. The team is driven by business needs, which requires collaboration with other Scientists, Engineers, and Product Managers across the organization. You get to influence stakeholders with clear communication skills. You innovate on behalf of the customer and strategically build features. You will mentor junior members and help them grow. About the team We're a new team within Personalization, focused on a different kind of recommendation: not "what product should this customer see" but "what knowledge should this AI use right now." Same scale, same rigor, entirely new problem space. The science is at the intersection of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and LLM reasoning — and the right approach hasn't been established yet. The team values innovation and offers a safe place to try, fail, and learn while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Everyone is a leader and owner for everything we do as a team. We offer creative space with an entrepreneurial work environment focusing on customer obsession.
Applied Scientist, SCOT FO - SnT
ES, B, Barcelona
How does Amazon decide which fulfillment center ships your order, which truck carries it, and how to keep promises across hundreds of millions of packages daily? How does it decide how many trucks and how much labor are required to ship orders across the network? SCOT Fulfillment Optimization (FO) owns the optimization and forecasting science behind these decisions. We are seeking Applied Scientists to join the FO Science & Tech team in Barcelona (alternatively: Luxembourg or London) with a strong academic background in optimization, machine learning, and/or time-series forecasting. • You will design and build state-of-the-art machine learning and optimization models that power Amazon's fulfillment decisions at an unprecedented scale across two core scientific pillars: • Large-Scale Optimization and Planning: Designing planning systems for order assignment and resource utilization, while balancing multi-objective cost-speed tradeoffs to enable controllers to steer millions of shipments per hour optimally. • Demand Forecasting & Predictive ML: Developing time-series forecasts for customer demand, incorporating contextual information (weather, sales, order properties), and modeling uncertainty for core planning systems. Basic qualifications • PhD in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience) • Strong programming skills (Python preferred; experience with optimization solvers a plus) • Research experience in one or more: • Large-scale mathematical programming (LP, MIP, decomposition methods) • Combinatorial optimization (assignment, scheduling, network flows) • Multi-objective optimization and control • Large-scale time-series forecasting (GenAI models, probabilistic forecasting, uncertainty quantification) • Causal inference (spatiotemporal causal modeling, offline policy evaluation) Preferred qualifications • Experience building optimization systems that run in production at scale • Being comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration cycles • Publications in relevant venues Key job responsibilities Design and implement optimization and forecasting models for large-scale fulfillment problems, from order assignment to network flow control. Build research prototypes end-to-end: from problem formulation through scalable implementation to production validation. Analyse complex tradeoffs (cost, speed, capacity, accuracy) and translate findings into actionable recommendations for leadership and operations teams. Collaborate with engineers to bring science solutions into production systems serving millions of customer orders daily. A day in the life You formulate an optimization or forecasting problem on a whiteboard with teammates, then prototype it in Python with real data by the afternoon. You run experiments against production-scale datasets, iterate on the model, and present results to stakeholders who will use them to make network decisions next week. Some days you dive deep into solver performance; other days you're explaining a Pareto frontier to an operations leader. You collaborate with large engineering and product teams to bring your solutions into systems serving millions of customers. Alongside fast-turnaround prototypes, you own long-term research bets, the kind that reshape how Amazon's fulfillment network operates at scale. Your work goes live. About the team SCOT Fulfillment Optimization Science & Tech (FO SnT) is the applied research team behind Amazon's fulfillment decision-making systems. We decide how orders get assigned to warehouses, how capacity is allocated across the network, and how cost and speed tradeoffs are managed in real time, at global scale. Our models influence billions of euros in annual operational spend. They protect sites from overload during peak, reduce transportation costs and CO2 emissions, and ensure customers receive their packages when promised. Leadership relies on our science to make investment decisions worth hundreds of millions. We are practitioners of large-scale optimization: MIP formulations, decomposition methods, approximation algorithms, and parallelisation. We use machine learning where it sharpens our decisions, including forecasting, learned heuristics, and multi-armed bandits. We pick the right tool for the problem, not the fashionable one. You will work alongside Senior and Principal scientists, and collaborate with Amazon Scholars and academic partners who bring frontier research into our applied problems. We code our prototypes to be production-ready and collaborate with large engineering teams to ship systems, not papers. Above all, we have fun solving hard real-world problems at real-world speed, failing, learning, and shipping along the way.
Data Scientist II, Device Economics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking Data Scientist II with strong science application skills to join our Device Economics team. This role will focus primarily on Amazon's innovative devices and services (e.g. Echo Family of Devices), working at the intersection of economic modeling, forecasting science, and business strategy. The ideal candidate will be responsible for pre-launch forecasts, annualized overall forecasts, identifying substitution patterns, and partnering closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand the evolution of the Devices portfolio. Key job responsibilities Forecasting & Modeling 1. Develop and maintain pre-launch forecasts and annualized overall forecasts for Amazon Devices 2. Identify and model substitution patterns across the device portfolio 3. Build economic and financial models to support demand planning and business decisions 4. Formulate relevant analytical frameworks to address key economic issues in device forecasting Science Communication & Collaboration 1. Explain complex science models and methodologies to non-technical stakeholders including product managers and marketing managers 2. Collaborate with economists, data scientists, and applied scientists across Decision Science 3. Present results of analyses to cross-functional teams and leadership 4. Build trust in science models and forecast outputs with product teams Innovation & Strategic Thinking 1. Think creatively about ways that leading-edge analytics and emerging data sources can address Devices' most pressing business challenges 2. Help internal teams leverage analytic tools to better manage innovation 3. Conduct empirical studies and perform quantitative and qualitative research 4. Identify opportunities to improve forecasting accuracy and business impact Cross-Functional Partnership 1. Work closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand portfolio evolution and business strategy 2. Support DSO leadership in quarterly business reviews and strategic planning A day in the life Your days will be split between refining and building models and working with business leaders to interpret them. You own science-based forecasts that can directly impact Amazon's bottom line on the order of multi-million dollar decisions. - You will perform model refreshes or updates to analyses as needed; and, - You will be expected to develop new techniques to process large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to design of automated systems. About the team The Decision Science team within DSO (Device Supply Organization) is responsible for forecasting and demand planning initiatives across Amazon Devices. The DSO team of 300+ engineers, scientists, and PMs applies quantitative methods and data-driven approaches to replace judgment-based decisions with science-driven forecasts. Decision Science focuses on lifetime demand forecasting using econometric and machine learning models for rapid reforecasting, mix adjustments, and portfolio management for new product launches. We also inform to go/no-go investment decision for new product initiatives
Applied Scientist II, Amazon Supply Chain
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join our team that is building enterprise applications leveraging machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI to help millions of companies worldwide manage their day-to-day supply chain operations. Our mission is to accelerate our customers' businesses through intuitive, differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring supply chain challenges. We blend strategic vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world operational experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions that make the 'buy versus build' decision a no-brainer for our customers. As an Applied Scientist, you will design and develop machine learning models and algorithms that power intelligent supply chain applications at global scale. You will work at the intersection of research and real-world product impact, translating scientific advances into production systems that serve millions of customers. We operate like a startup within AWS, offering you the opportunity to tackle complex challenges while working with the latest technologies in deep learning, large language models, and optimization. If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of applied science, thrive in ambiguous problem spaces, and want to shape the future of supply chain intelligence while having the backing of AWS's extensive resources, we want to hear from you. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models for demand forecasting, inventory optimization, anomaly detection, and supply chain decision-making. - Develop generative AI and agentic AI solutions that automate complex supply chain workflows and deliver intelligent, adaptive recommendations to customers. - Formulate real-world business problems as machine learning problems; define data requirements, model architectures, evaluation metrics, and experimentation frameworks. - Drive end-to-end applied science projects from ideation through experimentation, offline evaluation, A/B testing, and production deployment at scale. - Collaborate with engineering, product management, and business stakeholders to translate scientific capabilities into customer-facing product features, and mentor other scientists to raise the team's technical bar. A day in the life You will start many mornings reviewing experiment results and model metrics before joining a science sync where you and your teammates discuss progress, debug tricky modeling issues, and brainstorm new approaches. From there, you may spend focused time writing and testing model code in Python or PyTorch, running offline evaluations, or preparing an A/B test for a new forecasting algorithm. Expect regular working sessions with software engineers to integrate your models into production services, and occasional deep-dive reviews where you present your scientific approach and findings to the broader team. About the team The AWS Applied AI Solutions team builds enterprise applications that leverage Amazon's operational expertise to solve real-world supply chain challenges for millions of companies. We operate like a startup within AWS, moving fast and shipping iteratively with modern AI technologies. We invest in your growth through mentorship from experienced scientists, conference publication support, and internal science reading groups. If your career hasn't followed a traditional path, we encourage you to apply — we value varied experiences and perspectives.
Manager, Applied Science- Manipulation & Autonomy , Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to drive the development of next-generation manipulation and autonomy systems for robots operating in complex, real-world environments. This role is designed for an exceptional technical leader with a strong research background and a passion for translating cutting-edge ideas into working robotic systems. You will play a central role in defining the technical direction of our manipulation and autonomy stack, from problem formulation and algorithm design to system integration and real-world deployment. While this role is hands-on and deeply technical, it is also expected to evolve toward technical leadership and team building over time. Key job responsibilities - Lead research and development of manipulation and autonomy systems for robots, including planning, control, learning, and closed-loop execution - Design and implement algorithms, especially focused around autonomy and interaction with dynamic environments - Work closely with perception, motor control, hardware, and systems teams to build tightly integrated autonomy pipelines - Define evaluation methodologies, benchmarks, and simulation-to-real workflows for manipulation and autonomy - Stay deeply engaged with the research community, selectively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into deployed systems - Mentor and guide other researchers and engineers, help set technical direction, and contribute to team growth and research culture - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - 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.
Applied Scientist, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide end user applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are easy to adopt and easy to use. The Team Join the next science revolution at AWS Life Sciences Applied AI Solutions, where you'll work alongside world-class scientists to build AI that transforms how therapeutics are discovered, developed, and brought to patients. We're out to revolutionize how medicines are discovered, developed, and brought to patients, powered by a new generation of AI. Our team tackles some of the hardest open problems at the intersection of frontier AI and life sciences. We apply biological foundation models, large language models, and agentic reasoning systems to life sciences problems, then put them into the hands of customers as applications and managed services they can fine-tune, tailor, and deploy on their own data. The science challenges are deep: how do you design agentic systems that reason correctly over complex biological, regulatory, and clinical logic? How do you enable customers to tailor foundation models to their proprietary data and get better outputs with less effort? How do you adapt models to reason faithfully in high-stakes scientific and regulatory domains? Today we're focused on two areas. In clinical trials, we're building AI that automates and optimizes regulatory and clinical development workflows. In drug design, our products (including Amazon Bio Discovery) accelerate discovery by giving bench scientists AI-guided protein engineering and antibody design capabilities. We combine frontier research with production-scale delivery to put breakthrough science into the hands of customers solving humanity's hardest problems. We value scientific rigor, encourage publication, and support conference participation. If you want to do research that ships, this is the team. The Role We are seeking an Applied Scientist to build the models and methods behind our life sciences AI products, with a primary focus on clinical trial operations and agentic reasoning. You will design, train, and evaluate systems that reason over complex clinical and operational logic, and ship them into products customers use directly. You will work closely with senior and principal scientists on well-scoped research problems, own your results end to end, and see your work reach production. This role combines expertise in LLM reasoning and agentic AI with applied impact in life sciences. You will work on how large language models reason, plan, and act in complex scientific domains, while applying domain knowledge to ensure models produce scientifically valid outputs. The problems span multiple fronts: - How do you build LLM-based agentic systems that correctly reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and complex multi-step operational workflows? - How do you evaluate agent reliability and faithfulness rigorously enough to trust in high-stakes clinical settings? - How do you develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that let customers get strong results from foundation models on their own data? You will focus on clinical trial operations (agentic automation, structured reasoning, evaluation, domain adaptation), with opportunities to contribute across drug discovery (protein engineering, antibody design) as the portfolio grows. You will own end-to-end scientific solutions from research through production, and your work will directly shape the tools that scientists use daily. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate LLM-based agentic systems that reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and operational workflows - Build rigorous evaluation harnesses and benchmarks to measure agent reliability, faithfulness, and failure modes in high-stakes domains - Develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that help customers get better outputs on their own data with less effort - Contribute to graph-based and causal modeling approaches for clinical trial operations - Partner with Life Sciences domain experts, product, and engineering to translate scientific challenges into shipped capabilities - Own experiments end to end: problem framing, implementation, evaluation, iteration, and hand-off to production - Publish at top-tier venues where the work supports it - Contribute to drug discovery efforts (protein engineering, antibody design) as opportunities arise A day in the life - Design and run an experiment to validate a new agentic reasoning or fine-tuning method, then ship it as a capability customers can use - Diagnose why a model is failing on a new class of inputs and implement a fix to unblock a delivery milestone - Build or extend an evaluation benchmark to measure how faithfully an agent reasons over clinical logic - Meet with domain experts to scope what the next model release needs to do - Review results with a senior scientist, sharpen the approach, and get it over the finish line - Prototype a new idea that could become the next capability in the product About the team AWS Solutions As part of the AWS solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. we blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. Diverse Experiences AWS 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. 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 AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do. 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.
Senior Applied Scientist, Center for Quantum Computing: Device Team
US, CA, Pasadena
As a Senior Quantum Applied Scientist on our Device team, you will be a technical authority and driving force in the design and measurements of novel superconducting qubits. You will lead detailed simulation and measurement efforts to explain experimental results, inform new qubit designs, and optimize device performance, working collaboratively with our design, fabrication, processor, and exploratory research teams. This is a role with significant room for innovation: you will play a key role in finding paths towards more performant devices. We are looking for a seasoned researcher with deep expertise in superconducting circuit physics plus a proven track record of bridging design, simulation, and measurement. Success in this role requires both technical depth and a genuine passion for applied, collaborative work. The ideal candidate will excel at communication across disciplines — translating detailed analyses into actionable guidance for engineering teams — and will bring the experience and judgment to identify innovations that will have the greatest impact. Key job responsibilities • Develop simulations to predict device performance, then design and measure devices that leverage the understood scalings. • Reduce the gap between simulated predictions and measurements by building more accurate models. • Communicate scientific findings across the CQC, and, when appropriate, share results externally via conference presentations and publications in scientific journals • Identify and evaluate emerging research developments that could impact design decisions About the team The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing (CQC) is a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, on a mission to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
Sr. Data Scientist, Amazon Pay Data Products
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Pay strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric payments service. Our mission is to serve customers and merchant partners with the most trusted, friction-less and rewarding payment solutions for their needs on and off Amazon. We are seeking an exceptional Data Scientist III to drive innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions while leading high-impact initiatives across the organization. Key job responsibilities Technical Excellence Lead end-to-end machine learning projects using PyTorch, AWS SageMaker, and other leading ML frameworks Design and implement complex statistical models and deep learning solutions Develop and optimize MLOps pipelines for model training, evaluation, and deployment Experience with modern LLM frameworks and Generative AI applications Expertise in Python, R, and related data science libraries MLOps & Development Build automated ML pipelines using AWS services (CodePipeline, Lambda, Step Functions) Implement CI/CD practices for ML model deployment and monitoring Create containerized solutions using Docker for scalable model deployment Experience with model optimization and hyperparameter tuning using tools like Optuna Integrate ML solutions with monitoring tools like MLflow Business Impact & Leadership Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into technical solutions Design and develop business intelligence applications for real-time insights Lead technical initiatives and mentor junior data scientists Drive cross-functional collaboration to deliver innovative solutions Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences About the team The Amazon Pay Data Products team is a central unit that builds and maintains data products supporting Amazon Pay's growth across multiple markets. We operate at scale, processing 150M+ monthly transactions and managing 12 PB of data infrastructure. Our team consists of Business Intelligence Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product Managers who develop and maintain standardized reporting, data marts, and self-service analytics tools. Our expanded capabilities cover data science and Gen AI wherein we have built our first suite of multi-agent systems.
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social