Russell Allgor named INFORMS Fellow
INFORMS, the largest association for decision and data sciences, on Oct. 4 officially named 12 members as fellows, including Russell Allgor, chief scientist of Amazon's Worldwide Operations and Logistics organization. Being named an INFORMS fellow is one of the highest honors in the operations research profession.

Amazon's first research scientist elected an INFORMS fellow

Russell Allgor is recognized for outstanding lifetime achievement in operations research and the management sciences.

Amazon was founded in 1994 and six years later the company hired its first research scientist, Russell Allgor. Over the past 21 years, Allgor has seen the Amazon science community grow substantially, and he has risen to the role of chief scientist within the company’s Worldwide Operations and Logistics organization.

Considered one of the most influential scientists in the field of logistics and fulfillment systems for e-commerce, Allgor this week was officially named an INFORMS fellow. With more than 12,000 members from around the globe, INFORMS is the leading international association the decision and data scientists. Allgor will be inducted during the 2021 INFORMS Annual Meeting, which takes place later this month both virtually and on location in Anaheim, Calif.

In its press release, INFORMS said Allgor is being recognized “for significant management and application of operations research and management science to design and improve logistics and fulfillment systems for e-commerce.”

Earlier this year, INFORMS awarded Amazon its 2021 INFORMS Prize, which recognizes the effective integration of operations research and analytics into organizational decision-making. “In reality,” says Mauricio Resende, a principal research scientist with the company’s Middle Mile Research Science and Optimization organization, “that award can be mostly attributed to the work done by Russell.”

Allgor’s accomplishments began shortly after he joined the company as a senior manager of Network Optimization. Many of his analyses formed the foundation of Amazon’s retail logistics strategy. Early in his career, Allgor played a pivotal role in the location of new facilities (fulfillment centers), and the placement of inventory within those facilities.

He then was involved in the design of the algorithms to assign orders to fulfillment centers in real time, taking into consideration the state of the company’s entire fulfillment and transportation system. With the growth of the company’s fulfillment center network, Allgor then focused on the performance of that network, including its transportation component.

I am really proud of the value delivered to customers by the innovations that our team has created.
Russell Allgor

In 2010, he was named chief scientist, Worldwide Operations and Logistics, a role he has held for the past 11 years. During this time, Allgor has started the company’s Modeling and Optimization research group, and created the Routing Science Research team focused on last-mile routing of packages, as well as the Middle Mile Research Science team.

Allgor’s team utilizes scientific innovation and invention to support the more than 1 million Amazon employees and partners at fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and delivery stations worldwide who ensure that customers get their packages as reliably and safely as possible.

“I feel very honored to be recognized by INFORMS for the accomplishments that I have achieved at Amazon. I am really proud of the value delivered to customers by the innovations that our team has created, and I enjoy working with and learning from the talented team we have assembled,” said Allgor. “Our early success led to investment in additional research that has driven the growth of the research and science community at Amazon. We continue to innovate in order to deliver a massive selection of products to customers.”

Allgor earned a PhD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University. Earlier this year, he was elected  into the National Academy of Engineering for “application of operations engineering to design and improve logistics and fulfillment systems for e-commerce.” He was formally inducted into NAE at the organization’s annual meeting on Oct. 3, 2021, and was inducted into the Washington State Academy of Sciences on September 16, 2021.

Related content

US, MA, Boston
Are you excited about applying machine learning and applied mathematics to real-world systems at massive scale? As an Applied Scientist on this newly formed team, you will collaborate closely with scientists and engineers to bring research into production across a broad portfolio of problems — from computer vision perception platforms to building-wide optimization and orchestration. You will frame ambiguous business problems as tractable scientific challenges and implement novel machine learning (ML) systems, first-principles models, embedded systems prototypes, and performance optimizations in both prototype and production environments. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape the scientific direction of a new organization, where your contributions will directly influence how Amazon's fulfillment network operates and evolves. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy ML and scientific solutions spanning classical machine learning, statistical modeling, computer vision, optimization, and physics-informed modeling in production environments. - Rapidly ramp on unfamiliar problem domains, frame ambiguous business problems as tractable scientific challenges, and prototype solutions end to end. - Author or co-author research findings for internal or external peer-reviewed venues, and provide peer feedback on research procedures and results across teams. - Prototype and evaluate sensing hardware and lightweight, edge-deployable models that run on commodity compute under real-world constraints. - Collaborate across multiple science and engineering teams to integrate your solutions into deployment architecture, mentoring less experienced scientists along the way. A day in the life You might start your morning reviewing experiment results from an overnight model training run, then shift into a design discussion with engineers on how to deploy a new computer vision model to edge hardware in a fulfillment center. After lunch, you could be prototyping a physics-informed optimization approach, writing up findings for a research paper, or pairing with a teammate to debug a tricky data pipeline. As part of a new and growing organization, you will have a direct hand in shaping team practices, scientific roadmaps, and the tools you use every day. About the team Our team sits within Amazon's fulfillment technology organization and applies a range of scientific disciplines — including computer vision, optimization, reinforcement learning, and statistical modeling — to improve how goods move through Amazon's global fulfillment network. We build the models and systems that drive real-time orchestration, optimizing throughput, flow, and operational performance at scale. As a newly formed organization, we are building our culture and scientific agenda from the ground up. You will join a collaborative, inclusive group of scientists and engineers who value experimentation, rigorous research, and delivering measurable impact for customers.
CN, 31, Shanghai
Team & Project Overview The NBS Data Central team powers analytics, data science, and AI capabilities for Worldwide Global Selling (WWGS). We build scalable data products, and insight-generation systems that drive seller growth across 10+ marketplaces. Seller Intelligence is a P0 foundation theme at the Global Selling level, formed by merging "One Tagging" and "Good Contact" workstreams. It provides seller identity, segmentation, and contact-reach infrastructure that underpins all downstream seller-facing AI workflows — including intelligent outreach, personalized recommendations, and automated engagement. Scope of Impact Own the science pillar for Seller Intelligence within a cross-functional POD (PM + DE + DS + SDE) Directly impact seller engagement metrics across CN, IN, LATAM, and East-Asia expansion regions Models and data products consumed by 5+ downstream teams (ESM, NSR, MKT, NBS AI Ops, ROC) Influence $100M+ annual seller GMS through improved segmentation and contact optimization Key job responsibilities Design and deliver seller segmentation and propensity models at scale — incorporating GMS, category, growth trajectory, engagement signals, and lifecycle stage. Build contact quality scoring and lifecycle management systems (coverage optimization, dormancy detection, reactivation modeling). Define success metrics, experimentation frameworks (A/B, causal inference), and measurement methodology for seller engagement interventions. Productionize ML models and data products — partner with engineering to deploy seller scores, contact quality indices, and recommendation signals. Explore LLM/GenAI applications: automated insight generation from seller data, contact intent classification, and intelligent report synthesis. Serve as the science representative in bi-weekly NBS theme reviews; present findings and proposals to theme Bar Raisers and leadership. Collaborate with BIE team members to democratize analytical outputs via dashboards and self-serve tools. Contribute to cross-marketplace seller behavior analysis supporting Global Expansion strategy (IN, KR, VN, LATAM). Evaluate, integrate, and iterate on AI systems — assess new AI/ML tools, frameworks, and third-party models for applicability to seller intelligence use cases.
GB, London
Come build the future of entertainment with us. Are you interested in shaping the future of movies and television? Do you want to define the next generation of how and what Amazon customers are watching? Prime Video is a premium streaming service that offers customers a vast collection of TV shows and movies — all with the ease of finding what they love to watch in one place. We offer customers thousands of popular movies and TV shows from Originals and Exclusive content to exciting live sports events. We also offer our members the opportunity to subscribe to add-on channels which they can cancel at anytime and to rent or buy new release movies and TV box sets on the Prime Video Store. Prime Video is a fast-paced, growth business — available in over 240 countries and territories worldwide. The team works in a dynamic environment where innovating on behalf of our customers is at the heart of everything we do. If this sounds exciting to you, please read on. Prime Video Commerce's mission is to present the right offer to the right customer at the right time — across subscriptions, channels, and transactional video, in every market and on every device. Our science team replaces static business rules with ML-driven decisions that personalise the entire commerce journey, from discovery through checkout and beyond. We operate at scale across hundreds of millions of customers, and we are expanding into new frontiers — combining the latest advances in agentic and generative AI, behavioural simulation, and causal inference to understand the impact of our decisions before they reach customers. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join the Prime Video Commerce Insights team in London. You will develop and deploy customer-facing models, understand customer behaviour at scale, and explore emerging techniques that help us make better decisions faster. This is a delivery focused role within a high-visibility multidisciplinary group of engineers and scientists, focused on improving the customer experience for Prime Video. Key job responsibilities - Research, design, and implement machine learning approaches (e.g. reinforcement learning and recommendation systems) that personalise across different customer touch points. - Collaborate with engineers to deploy and integrate successful experiment results into large-scale, complex Amazon production systems with low latency. - Design and execute rigorous experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. - Act as a subject-matter expert and help define the science roadmap and research agenda in line with organisational priorities and production constraints. - Provide machine learning thought leadership to technical and business leaders, thinking strategically about business, product, and technical challenges. - Work with technical product managers to work backwards from what matters to customers and deliver ML-backed solutions. - Share results with the team and wider scientific community through documents that are both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant. A day in the life You will be a research leader and innovator within the Commerce Insights organisation. You will collaborate with talented engineers and senior leaders to solve problems that are uniquely challenging at Amazon's scale: personalising commerce decisions across multiple business lines, balancing competing objectives, and positively impacting hundreds of millions of customers worldwide. The problems here are technically deep — combining large-scale ML, causal reasoning, and behavioural modelling in a domain where every decision carries real revenue and customer-experience consequences. Your research will ship to production and move metrics that matter. About the team You will join a team of engineers and applied scientists with a proven track record of solving highly complex, ambiguous problems — work that has produced patents and publications at top-tier conferences. The team has direct visibility to senior Prime Video leadership and collaborates broadly across Commerce, Content, and Platform teams to shape how customers discover, subscribe to, and engage with video content. This is a team that operates at the intersection of rigorous research and real-world impact, where your ideas move from whiteboard to production for hundreds of millions of customers.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like the Kindle family of products, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Health Wellness, Amazon Echo & Astro products. This is an exciting opportunity to join Amazon in developing state-of-the-art techniques that bring Gen AI on edge for our consumer products. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team and help develop the next generation of edge models, and optimize them while doing co-designed with custom ML HW based on a revolutionary architecture. Work hard. Have Fun. Make History. Key job responsibilities What will you do? - Quantize, prune, distill, finetune Gen AI models to optimize for edge platforms - Fundamentally understand Amazon’s underlying Neural Edge Engine to invent optimization techniques - Analyze deep learning workloads and provide guidance to map them to Amazon’s Neural Edge Engine - Use first principles of Information Theory, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning Theory, Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics - Train custom Gen AI models that beat SOTA and paves path for developing production models - Collaborate closely with compiler engineers, fellow Applied Scientists, Hardware Architects and product teams to build the best ML-centric solutions for our devices - Publish in open source and present on Amazon's behalf at key ML conferences - NeurIPS, ICLR, MLSys.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like the Kindle family of products, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Health Wellness, Amazon Echo & Astro products. This is an exciting opportunity to join Amazon in developing state-of-the-art techniques that bring Gen AI on edge for our consumer products. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team and help develop the next generation of edge models, and optimize them while doing co-designed with custom ML HW based on a revolutionary architecture. Work hard. Have Fun. Make History. Key job responsibilities What will you do? - Quantize, prune, distill, finetune Gen AI models to optimize for edge platforms - Fundamentally understand Amazon’s underlying Neural Edge Engine to invent optimization techniques - Analyze deep learning workloads and provide guidance to map them to Amazon’s Neural Edge Engine - Use first principles of Information Theory, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning Theory, Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics - Train custom Gen AI models that beat SOTA and paves path for developing production models - Collaborate closely with compiler engineers, fellow Applied Scientists, Hardware Architects and product teams to build the best ML-centric solutions for our devices - Publish in open source and present on Amazon's behalf at key ML conferences - NeurIPS, ICLR, MLSys.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like the Kindle family of products, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Health Wellness, Amazon Echo & Astro products. This is an exciting opportunity to join Amazon in developing state-of-the-art techniques that bring Gen AI on edge for our consumer products. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team and help develop the next generation of edge models, and optimize them while doing co-designed with custom ML HW based on a revolutionary architecture. Work hard. Have Fun. Make History. Key job responsibilities What will you do? - Quantize, prune, distill, finetune Gen AI models to optimize for edge platforms - Fundamentally understand Amazon’s underlying Neural Edge Engine to invent optimization techniques - Analyze deep learning workloads and provide guidance to map them to Amazon’s Neural Edge Engine - Use first principles of Information Theory, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning Theory, Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics - Train custom Gen AI models that beat SOTA and paves path for developing production models - Collaborate closely with compiler engineers, fellow Applied Scientists, Hardware Architects and product teams to build the best ML-centric solutions for our devices - Publish in open source and present on Amazon's behalf at key ML conferences - NeurIPS, ICLR, MLSys.
US, CA, San Francisco
Join the next revolution in robotics at Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team, where you'll work alongside world-renowned AI pioneers to push the boundaries of what's possible in robotic intelligence. As a Member of Technical Staff, you'll be at the forefront of developing breakthrough foundation models that enable robots to perceive, understand, and interact with the world in unprecedented ways. You'll drive independent research initiatives in areas such as perception, manipulation, science understanding, locomotion, manipulation, sim2real transfer, multi-modal foundation models and multi-task robot learning, designing novel frameworks that bridge the gap between state-of-the-art research and real-world deployment at Amazon scale. In this role, you'll balance innovative technical exploration with practical implementation, collaborating with platform teams to ensure your models and algorithms perform robustly in dynamic real-world environments. You'll have access to Amazon's vast computational resources, enabling you to tackle ambitious problems in areas like very large multi-modal robotic foundation models and efficient, promptable model architectures that can scale across diverse robotic applications. Key job responsibilities - Drive independent research initiatives across the robotics stack, including robotics foundation models, focusing on breakthrough approaches in perception, and manipulation, for example open-vocabulary panoptic scene understanding, scaling up multi-modal LLMs, sim2real/real2sim techniques, end-to-end vision-language-action models, efficient model inference, video tokenization - Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish - Lead full-stack robotics projects from conceptualization through deployment, taking a system-level approach that integrates hardware considerations with algorithmic development, ensuring robust performance in production environments - Collaborate with platform and hardware teams to ensure seamless integration across the entire robotics stack, optimizing and scaling models for real-world applications - Contribute to the team's technical strategy and help shape our approach to next-generation robotics challenges A day in the life - Design and implement novel foundation model architectures and innovative systems and algorithms, leveraging our extensive infrastructure to prototype and evaluate at scale - Collaborate with our world-class research team to solve complex technical challenges - Lead technical initiatives from conception to deployment, working closely with robotics engineers to integrate your solutions into production systems - Participate in technical discussions and brainstorming sessions with team leaders and fellow scientists - Leverage our massive compute cluster and extensive robotics infrastructure to rapidly prototype and validate new ideas - Transform theoretical insights into practical solutions that can handle the complexities of real-world robotics applications About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics, we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through innovative foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
US, CA, San Francisco
We are seeking to hire software engineers who are excited about research for robot manipulation with the goal of developing manipulation systems at human-level performance. Our strategy focuses on a real2sim2real pipeline that learns from large scale human videos and leverage simulation and reinforcement learning to bridge the human-to-robot embodiment gap. Key job responsibilities • Learning manipulation: Design and implement robot learning algorithms for manipulation • Leverage vision models to extract 3D hand-object manipulation information from real-world situations • Develop large-scale real2sim2real pipeline for manipulation • Multimodal Sensor Fusion: Integrate tactile sensing, proprioception and vision into the learning pipeline About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR), we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
US, WA, Seattle
Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and exclusive access to coverage of live sports. All customers regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can access programming from subscriptions such as Apple TV, Peacock Premium Plus, HBO Max, FOX One, Crunchyroll and MGM+, as well as more than 900 free ad-support (FAST) Channels, rent or buy titles, and enjoy even more content for free with ads. The Prime Video Personalization and Discovery team matches customers with the right content at the right time, at all touch points throughout the content discovery journey. We are looking for a customer-focused, solutions-oriented Data Scientist to help build new data-driven frameworks to understand what makes new personalization and content discovery innovations successful for users and the business. You'll be part of an embedded science team on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and ultimately influence what millions of customers around the world see when the log into Prime Video. The ideal candidate brings strong problem-solving skills, stakeholder communication skills, and the ability to balance technical rigor with delivery speed and customer impact. You will build cross-functional support within Prime Video, assess business problems, define metrics, and support iterative scientific solutions that balance short-term delivery with long-term science roadmaps. Key job responsibilities - Use advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to extract insights from complex, large-scale data sets - Design and implement end-to-end data science workflows, from data acquisition and cleaning to model development, testing, and deployment - Support scalable, self-service data analyses by building datasets for analytics, reporting and ML use cases - Partner with product stakeholders and senior science peers to identify strategic data-driven opportunities to improve the customer experience - Communicate findings, conclusions, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders - Stay up-to-date on the latest data science tools, techniques, and best practices and help evangelize them across the organization
US, CA, San Francisco
The Models, Quantum, and Silicon (MQS) 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. We are looking to hire a Research Software Engineer to join our growing Software team. You will work closely with our experimental physics teams to enable their work characterizing, calibrating, and operating novel quantum devices. The ideal candidate should be able to translate high-level science requirements into software implementations (e.g. Python APIs/frameworks, data analysis pipelines, calibration nodes) that are performant, scalable, and intuitive. This requires someone who (1) has a strong desire to work within a team of scientists and engineers, and (2) demonstrates ownership in initiating and driving projects to completion. This role has a particular emphasis on working directly with experimental physicists to develop scientific software workflows that enable scaling to larger quantum devices. Inclusive Team Culture Here at Amazon, 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. Diverse Experiences Amazon 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. 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. Export Control Requirement Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be either a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum, or be able to obtain a US export license. If you are unsure if you meet these requirements, please apply and Amazon will review your application for eligibility. Key job responsibilities - Architect extensible & intuitive frameworks for running quantum computing experiments and analyzing data. - Leverage the latest techniques in quantum calibration to enable scaling to larger devices. - Optimize the performance of experiment & analysis tools to enable faster experiment throughput. - Develop dashboards that allow experimentalists to inspect and control the state of quantum device calibration. - Deploy and maintain cloud infrastructure that supports increasingly-complex science workflows. - Empower scientists to actively contribute to the codebase through mentorship and documentation. We are looking for candidates with strong engineering principles, a bias for action, superior problem-solving, and excellent communication skills. Working effectively within a team environment is essential. As a Research Software Engineer embedded in a broader research science organization, you will have the opportunity to work on new ideas and stay abreast of the field of experimental quantum computation. A day in the life The majority of your time will be spent on projects that extend the functional capabilities or performance of our internal research software stack. This requires working backwards from the needs of our science staff in the context of our larger experimental roadmap. You will translate science and software requirements into design proposals balancing implementation complexity against time-to-delivery. Once a design proposal has been reviewed and accepted, you’ll drive implementation and coordinate with internal stakeholders to ensure a smooth roll out. Because many high-level experimental goals have cross-cutting requirements, you’ll often work closely with other engineers or scientists or on the team. About the team You will be joining the Software group within the MQS Center of Quantum Computing. Our team is comprised of scientists and software engineers who are building scalable software that enables quantum computing technologies.