Social
A grid of 12 women scientists who were asked what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community
As International Women's Day approached, we asked women scientists from research areas across the company what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community.
Credit: Glynis Condon
Sustainability

How to forge a more gender-equal science community

International Women's Day is March 8 with the theme: #ChooseToChallenge.

By Staff writer
March 4, 2021
9 min read
Share

International Women’s Day (IWD) is March 8, 2021. The day celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women, and also denotes a call to action to accelerate gender parity. This year’s theme: #ChooseToChallenge.

International Women's Day logo

“From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge,” says the IWD website.

As IWD approached, Amazon Science asked women scientists from research areas across the company what three steps we can take as a society to forge a more gender-equal science community. Below are their responses.

Bouchra Bouqata

Bouchra is a senior applied scientist within Amazon Robotics. She earned her PhD in machine learning and artificial intelligence from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Bouchra Bouqata
Bouchra Bouqata

  • Provide a clear pipeline for advancing and promoting women’s careers in science. Companies and institutions should adopt gender-balanced peer review promotion processes and committees.  They should also provide special funds and grants to help women scientists further their research and work.
  • Conferences and publishing venues should adopt gender-conscious peer-review committee, and speaker- selection committee recruitment processes.
  • Companies and institutions should commit to educating everyone, not just leadership, to combat the issues facing women in science. They should provide gender awareness training as a standard component of any training they provide to their employees and members. They should provide seminars and convene roundtable discussions on gender issues in science to facilitate communication and identification of solutions.

Nilay Noyan Bulbul

Nilay is a principal scientist within the company’s Supply Chain Optimization Technologies organization.  She earned her PhD in operations research from Rutgers University.

Nilay Noyan Bulbul
Nilay Noyan Bulbul

  • Call the gender disparity out: Identify where women scientists are marginalized, and call out the disparity to ensure fair representation at the leadership of scientific research and decision-making, as well as “invite-only” prestigious roles, such as keynote speaking engagements, prize juries, and journal editorial board memberships.
  • Invest in the future: Create more initiatives and opportunities for the next generation of women scientists via mentoring and targeted prize and research fund calls.
  • Keep everyone accountable: Make sure every entity working towards gender equality in science community has a tangible way to measure the “change” and keep track of the progress, and make the process transparent.”

Cindy Cui

Cindy is a senior economist within the Alexa Shopping organization. She earned her PhD in economics from the University of Texas at Austin.  

Cindy Cui
Cindy Cui

Role models, aspirations, and supportive community are most important factors to me. Growing up, my grandma taught me reading and math. I still remember the days when we would go through math problems and I felt happy and proud when I solved them correctly.

My grandma is also one of the few female teachers in her generation and always emphasizes the importance of education and hard work. In school, many smart female classmates encouraged and challenged me throughout.

It takes all of us to improve gender equality in science, doing our best and helping others along the way.

Donna Dodson

Donna is a senior principal technologist within the AWS Security organization. She earned her master’s degree in computer science from Hood College.

Donna Dodson
Donna Dodson

  • Build a culture that values deep thinkers who balance speaking and listening to others. Often the subculture’s voices — including women’s — are not heard.
  • Create compensation, incentives, benefits, resources, recognition and a flexible workplace that balance needs at different stages in life. Early- and mid-career scientists with families require flexibility for a work-life balance.
  • Recognize and promote diverse voices throughout K-12 science programs to empower girls to grow their confidence in science knowledge, skills and abilities

Maryam Fazel-Zarandi

Maryam is a senior machine learning scientist within the Alexa AI organization. She earned her PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto.

Maryam Fazel-zarandi
Maryam Fazel-Zarandi
Credit: Pierce Harman Photography

I have been able to pursue my dream of becoming a scientist and have had access to role models and mentors throughout my education and career. The number of women scientists like me has increased over the past decades, however, we are still far from a gender equal science community.

While we should continue to reduce the large gap that still exists in terms of numbers, in my opinion, we should put more focus on mechanisms to retain women scientists. Lack of support for women in difficulty, feelings of isolation at work, and unmet expectations are among the top reasons why women leave their careers in science. The COVID-19 pandemic has further contributed to these difficulties as more women are taking additional caregiver roles at home, which in turn impacts their continued employment and career advancement.

To forge a more gender-equal global science community, we need to promote women’s integration in the research environment and workplace by learning about women’s experiences and providing direct support for women in difficulty. Our institutions and organizations should also implement and monitor measures to ensure womens’ career development in a post-pandemic world.

Rashmi Gangadharaiah

Rashmi is a senior research scientist within the AWS organization. She earned her PhD in information technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Rashmi Gangadharaiah
Rashmi Gangadharaiah

As a woman and a mother of two girls, I’m glad that gender equality has been receiving more attention. Just talking about gender equality doesn’t mean that we’ve created a gender-equal community. Here are three steps that we can take to create a gender-equal global science community.

  1. Create opportunities that encourage more women to tackle challenging projects.
  2. Recognize women who have an impact on projects and give credit where it’s due.
  3. We as women should not be afraid to take on challenging projects, grab opportunities that come our way and have a community/support system when the deck is stacked against us.

Antia Lamas-Linares

Antia is a principal research scientist within the AWS Center for Quantum Computing. She earned her PhD in physics from the University of Oxford.

Antia Lamas-linares
Antia Lamas-Linares

Helping diversify science is often not about actions within science, but immediately around science; removing the “death by a thousand cuts” problems.

The most impactful action we can take to improve science careers for women is to prioritize affordable childcare in research campuses (both university and industrial). This also has the very nice feature of benefiting the whole community of researchers, but it would have a disproportionate effect on women, while avoiding the insidious problems of preferential treatment.

If we can make space in campuses for exercise and culture, we can make space for daycares. A second thing we could do is prominently feature female scientists without remarking on their gender, they should not be an anomaly that needs to be highlighted and this narrative can be gently pushed from within organizations. Thirdly, and this is more of a personal action, actively avoid discouraging girls for pursuing geeky interests. Boys get rewarded with questions and attention for this behavior. Girls get the opposite signals.

Bilan Liu

Bilan is an applied robotics scientist within the company’s Lab126 organization. She earned her PhD in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester.

Bilan Liu
Bilan Liu

  • The key aspect for a gender equal world is an environment where women share the same opportunities as men, such as quality education.
  • A gender equal world not only calls for the equality of women, but also quality among women. It is beneficial to share the recognition of successful women, as well as to have supportive peers and mentors for young women.
  • We should advocate to elevate women’s voices, both in the workplace and the media. Increasing the representation of women in a workplace not only creates a better workplace, it also changes perceptions about the value that women bring to the table.

Catherine Benoit Norris

Catherine is a science researcher within the company’s Sustainability organization.  She earned her PhD in business administration from the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Catherine Benoit Norris
Catherine Benoit Norris

  • Acknowledge and support workers, students, professionals, and scientists as parents. Until we fully recognize the needs of families, and have a work culture that allows setting limits, women will continue to be held back.
  • Make sure that everyone speaks and are listened to in meetings. Making sure that everybody is being heard and are being paid attention to when they speak is fundamental for a gender-equal global science community.
  • Support, encourage, value, and recognize women academic achievements. Publicly valuing, rewarding, and celebrating competence and achievements in women is a stepping stone towards gender equality in science and beyond.

Tara Taghavi

Tara is a senior applied scientist within the Alexa AI organization. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Tara Taghavi
Tara Taghavi

A first step in promoting gender equality is to involve more women in hiring processes, particularly hiring loops for science roles.

A second step is to facilitate a more favorable work environment for mothers by providing alternate hours, a reduced time schedule, and similar measures so women can grow their careers as they grow their families.

A third step is to empower women to take management roles. Many statistics have been shared regarding the disproportionate number of women who are promoted in comparison to their male counterparts. We should address it by encouraging women to pursue these roles, and then supporting them as they take on the responsibilities of these higher-level roles.

Nedelina Teneva

Nedelina is an applied scientist (search) within the Alexa organization. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Chicago.

Nedelina Teneva
Nedelina Teneva

Engaging in cross-disciplinary collaborations forces us to be curious, empowers us to say “I don’t know” and ask others “What do you think?”. 

This helps us better understand others’ lived experiences. In both professional and personal collaborations, we need to apply more rigorously the scientific method, which minimizes the influence of prejudice, by recognizing our biases or pre-existing beliefs and designing appropriate management strategies.

Finally, we need to continue to solidify these processes into platforms and organizations that nurture diverse opinions. Lessons learned from the existing diversity/inclusion efforts within the science community should be utilized in the broader society. 

Nikhita Vedula

Nikhita is an applied scientist with the Alexa Shopping organization. She earned her PhD in computer science and engineering from Ohio State University.

Nikita Vedula
Nikhita Vedula

Education, encouragement, and awareness are key to fostering the growth of a more gender-equal science community.  Throughout my studies — straight through the completion of my PhD — I have seen at best an 80-20 ratio of men to women in classrooms, and academic or industrial positions. This needs to change, and this change needs to begin within our homes.    

Women require support from both men and other women alike, right from their childhood. We need to inspire and motivate women to nurture their dreams, and pursue their unique passions, instead of telling them things like “This field is for men, not for you”.

Research areas
Tags
About the Author
Staff writer

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Applied Scientist, Trustworthy Shopping Experience (TSE)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about solving complex business problems at scale through Generative AI? Do you want to help build intelligent systems that reason, act, and learn from minimal supervision? If so, we have an exciting opportunity for you on Amazon's Trustworthy Shopping Experience (TSE) team. At TSE, our vision is to guarantee customers a worry-free shopping experience by earning their trust that the products they buy are safe, authentic, and compliant with regulations and policy. We do this in close partnership with our selling partners, empowering them with best-in-class tools and expertise to offer a high-quality, compliant selection that customers trust. As an Applied Scientist I, you will bring subject matter expertise in at least one relevant discipline (e.g., NLP, computer vision, representation learning, agentic architecture) to contribute to next-generation agentic AI solutions that automate complex manual investigation processes at Amazon scale. Working alongside senior scientists, you will map business goals—such as reducing cost-of-serving while maintaining trust and safety standards—to well-defined scientific problems and metrics. You will invent, refine, and experiment with solutions spanning agentic reasoning, self-supervised representation learning, few-shot adaptation, multimodal understanding, and model compression. With guidance from senior scientists, you will stay current on research trends and benchmark your results against the state of the art. You will help design and execute experiments to identify optimal solutions, initiating the development and implementation of small components with team guidance. You will write secure, stable, testable, and well-documented production code at the level of an SDE I, rigorously evaluating models and quantifying performance. You will handle data in accordance with Amazon policies, troubleshoot issues to root cause, and ensure your work does not put the company at risk. Your scope of influence will typically be at the self-level, with the possibility of mentoring interns. You will participate in team design and prioritization discussions, learn the business context behind TSE's products, and escalate problems with proposed solutions. You will publish internal technical reports and may contribute to peer-reviewed publications and external review activities when aligned with business needs. This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to end-to-end AI development—from research through production—with your contributions serving hundreds of millions of customers within months, not years. Key job responsibilities • Contribute to the design and development of agentic AI systems with multi-step reasoning, autonomous task execution, and multimodal intelligence, including feedback and memory mechanisms, leveraging reinforcement learning techniques for agent decision-making and policy optimization, with input and guidance from senior scientists • Help productionize models built on top of SFT (Supervised Fine-tuning) and RFT (Reinforced Fine-tuning) approaches, as well as few-shot approaches based on multimodal datasets spanning text, images, and structured data, applying mathematical optimization techniques to improve efficiency, resource allocation, and decision-making in complex workflows, working alongside senior scientists to identify optimal solutions • Contribute to building production-ready deep learning and conventional ML solutions, including multimodal fusion and cross-modal alignment techniques that seamlessly connect visual, textual, and relational understanding, to support automation requirements within your team's scope • Help identify customer and business problems; use reasonable assumptions, data, and customer requirements to solve well-defined scientific problems involving multimodal inputs such as unstructured text, documents, product images, and relational data, developing representations that capture complementary signals across modalities and mapping business goals to scientific metrics • May co-author research papers for peer-reviewed internal and/or external venues, including contributions in areas such as multimodal representation learning and vision-language modeling, and contribute to the wider scientific community by reviewing research submissions, when aligned with business needs • Prototype rapidly, iterate based on feedback, and deliver small components at SDE I level—including multimodal data pipelines and inference modules—that integrate into production-scale systems • Write secure, stable, testable, maintainable, and well-documented code, balancing model capability, deployment cost, and resource usage across multimodal architectures while understanding state-of-the-art data structures, algorithms, and performance tradeoffs • Rigorously test code and evaluate models across individual and combined modalities, quantifying their performance; troubleshoot issues, research root causes, and thoroughly resolve defects, leaving systems more maintainable • Participate in team design, scoping, and prioritization discussions through clear verbal and written communication; seek to learn the business context, science, and engineering behind your team's products, including how multimodal signals contribute to trust and safety decisions • Participate in engineering best practices with peer reviews; clearly document approaches and communicate design decisions; publish internal technical reports to institutionalize scientific learning • Help train and mentor scientist interns; identify and escalate problems with proposed solutions, taking ownership or ensuring clear hand-off to the right owner About the team Trustworthy Shopping Experience Product team in TSE is responsible for the human-in-the-loop products and technology used in the risk investigations at Amazon. The team is also responsible for reducing the cost of performing the investigations, by automating wherever possible and optimizing the experience where manual interventions are needed. The team leverages state-of-the art technology and GenAI to deliver the products and associated goals.
Applied Scientist II, Advertising Incrementality Measurement
US, NY, New York
Do you want to lead the Ads industry and redefine how we measure the effectiveness of Amazon Ads business? Are you passionate about causal inference, Deep Learning & AI, raising the science bar, and connecting leading-edge science research to Amazon-scale implementation? If so, come join Amazon Ads to be a science leader within our Advertising Incrementality Measurement science team! Our work builds the foundations for providing customer-facing advertising measurement tools, furthering internal research & development, and building out Amazon's advertising measurement offerings. Incrementality is a lynchpin for the next generation of Amazon Advertising measurement solutions, and this role will play a key role in the release and expansion of these offerings. We are looking for a thought leader that has an aptitude for delivering customer-focused solutions and who enjoys working on the intersection of Big-Data analytics, Machine/Deep Learning, and Causal Inference. A successful candidate will be a self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, able to think big and be creative, while still paying careful attention to detail. You should be able to translate how data represents the customer journey, be comfortable dealing with large and complex data sets, and have experience using machine learning and/or econometric modeling to solve business problems. You should have strong analytical and communication skills, be able to work with product managers to define key business questions and work with the engineering team to bring our solutions into production. You will join a highly collaborative and diverse working environment that will empower you to shape the future of Amazon advertising, and also allow you to become part of our large science community. Key job responsibilities • Apply expertise in ML/DL, AI, and causal modeling to develop new models that describe how advertising impacts customers’ actions • Own the end-to-end development of novel scientific models that address the most pressing needs of our business stakeholders and help guide their future actions • Improve upon and simplify our existing solutions and frameworks • Review and audit modeling processes and results for other scientists, both junior and senior • Work with leadership to align our scientific developments with the business strategy • Identify new opportunities that are suggested by the data insights • Bring a department-wide perspective into decision making • Develop and document scientific research to be shared with the greater science community at Amazon About the team AIM is a cross disciplinary team of engineers, product managers, economists, data scientists, and applied scientists with a charter to build scientifically-rigorous causal inference methodologies at scale. Our job is to help customers cut through the noise of the modern advertising landscape and understand what actions, behaviors, and strategies actually have a real, measurable impact on key outcomes. The data we produce becomes the effective ground truth for advertisers and partners making decisions affecting millions in advertising spend.
Applied Scientist, Ads Measurement Science
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of advertiser's ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We also own the science solutions for AI tools that unlock new insights and automate high-effort customer workflows, such as custom query and report generation based on natural language user requests. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. As an Applied Scientist on the team, you will lead measurement solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. Key job responsibilities - Leverage deep expertise in one or more scientific disciplines to invent solutions to ambiguous ads measurement problems - Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria - Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents - Implement a significant portion of critical-path code, and partner with engineers to directly carry solutions into production - Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects - Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences - Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences - Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work - Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Applied Scientist, Ads Measurement Science
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of advertiser's ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We also own the science solutions for AI tools that unlock new insights and automate high-effort customer workflows, such as custom query and report generation based on natural language user requests. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. As an Applied Scientist on the team, you will lead measurement solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. Key job responsibilities - Leverage deep expertise in one or more scientific disciplines to invent solutions to ambiguous ads measurement problems - Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria - Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents - Implement a significant portion of critical-path code, and partner with engineers to directly carry solutions into production - Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects - Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences - Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences - Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work - Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Machine Learning Scientist / Applied Scientist, EU Prime and Marketing Analytics & Science (PRIMAS)
ES, B, Barcelona
Are you interested in changing how Amazon does marketing — moving beyond platform-optimized broad reach to campaigns that find the right customer, at the right moment, using Amazon's unmatched 1P data? We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join PRIMAS (Prime & Marketing Analytics and Science). In this role, you will design and run the experiments that answer the foundational question for EU marketing: does adding 1P audience signal on top of Value-Based Optimization (VBO) improve marketing efficiency — and if so, for which customer cohorts, on which surfaces, and at what scale? Amazon's current marketing model is largely platform-led: we set objectives and let platforms optimize toward conversion. This approach works well for broad acquisition but systematically underserves lifecycle goals — it cannot distinguish between a Bargain Hunter who will never pay full price and a high-potential customer one nudge away from becoming a Prime member. This role sits at the center of changing that. You will build the 1P audiences, design the experiments that test them, and generate the evidence that guides how Amazon allocates hundreds of millions in marketing spend. Year 1 is an experimentation year. You will deploy 1P audiences across multiple surfaces and channels — Meta, Google, Amazon Display Ads — and measure incrementally against VBO baselines. The goal is not to replace platform optimization but to understand when and where the combination of 1P signal + VBO outperforms VBO alone, and to build the experimental infrastructure that makes this learning scalable. Key job responsibilities 1P Audience Development & Experimentation: - Build and validate 1P audience segments from Amazon behavioral, transactional, and lifecycle data - Design experiments that isolate the incremental effect of 1P audience signal over platform VBO baselines - Deploy audiences across activation surfaces and establish measurement standards that make cross-surface comparison valid Causal Measurement & Incrementality: - Apply causal inference methods to measure the true incremental lift of audience-based targeting vs. VBO - Develop power analysis frameworks and guardrails that enable rapid experimentation without underpowered or conflated tests - Deliver optimization recommendations grounded in experimental evidence: which cohorts respond, which surfaces deliver, which creative strategies drive behavior change Scaling the Learning: - Build reusable audience and measurement frameworks that can be deployed across campaigns and channels — year 1 experiments should produce infrastructure, not one-off analyses - Document experimental learnings in a way that informs both the 2026 roadmap and the business case for investing further in 1P audience capabilities in 2027+ - Partner with engineering and PMT to translate validated audience prototypes into production-ready solutions that scale beyond the experimentation phase About the team The PRIMAS team, is part of a larger tech tech team of 100+ people called WIMSI (WW Integrated Marketing Systems and Intelligence). WIMSI core mission is to accelerate marketing technology capabilities that enable de-averaged customer experiences across the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
Member of Technical Staff, AI Product Manager, AGI Autonomy
US, MA, Boston
We're a new research lab based in San Francisco and Boston focused on developing foundational capabilities for useful AI agents. We're pursuing several key research bets that will enable AI agents to perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer human goals. We're particularly excited about combining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning and planning, learned world models, and generalizing agents to physical environments. We're a small, talent-dense team with the resources and scale of Amazon. Each team has the autonomy to move fast and the long-term commitment to pursue high-risk, high-payoff research. AI agents are the next frontier—the right research bets can reinvent what's possible. Join us and help build this lab from the ground up. Key job responsibilities * Define the product vision and roadmap for our agentic developer platform, translating research into products developers love * Partner deeply with research and engineering to identify which capabilities are ready for productization and shape how they're exposed to customers * Own the developer experience end-to-end from API design and SDK ergonomics to documentation, sample apps, and onboarding flows * Understand our customers deeply by engaging directly with developers and end-users, synthesizing feedback, and using data to drive prioritization * Shape how the world builds AI agents by defining new primitives, patterns, and best practices for agentic applications About the team Our team brings the AGI Lab's agent capabilities to customers. We build accessible, usable products: interfaces, frameworks, and solutions, that turn our platform and model capabilities into AI agents developers can use. We own the Nova Act agent playground, Nova Act IDE extension, Nova Act SDK, Nova Act AWS Console, reference architectures, sample applications, and more.
Senior Applied Scientist, Navigation
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon is on a mission to redefine the future of automation — and we're looking for exceptional talent to help lead the way. We are building the next generation of advanced robotic systems that seamlessly blend cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and novel mechanical design to create adaptable, intelligent automation solutions capable of operating safely alongside humans in dynamic, real-world environments. At Amazon, we leverage the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advanced robotics to solve some of the most complex operational challenges at a scale unlike anywhere else in the world. Our fleet of robots spans hundreds of facilities globally, working in sophisticated coordination to deliver on our promise of customer excellence — and we're just getting started. As a Sr. Scientist in Robot Navigation, you will be at the forefront of this transformation — architecting and delivering navigation systems that are intelligent, safe, and scalable. You will bring deep expertise in learning-based planning and control, a strong understanding of foundation models and their application to embodied agents, and as well as have in-depth understanding of control-theoretic approaches such as model predictive control (MPC)-based trajectory planning. You will develop navigation solutions that seamlessly blend data-driven intelligence with principled control-theoretic guarantees. Our vision is bold: to build navigation systems that allow robots to move fluidly and safely through dynamic environments — understanding context, anticipating change, and adapting in real time. You will lead research that bridges the gap between cutting-edge academic advances and production grade deployment, collaborating with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of robotic autonomy, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent navigation systems that will define the future of autonomous robotics at scale. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy perception algorithms for robotics systems, including object detection, segmentation, tracking, depth estimation, and scene understanding - Lead research initiatives in computer vision, sensor fusion and 3D perception - Collaborate with cross-functional teams including robotics engineers, software engineers, and product managers to define and deliver perception capabilities - Drive end-to-end ownership of ML models — from data collection and labeling strategy to training, evaluation, and deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers; contribute to a culture of technical excellence - Define and track key metrics to measure perception system performance in real-world environments - Publish research findings in top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, NeurIPS, etc.) and contribute to patents A day in the life - Train ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, identify and document their limitations post-deployment - Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders to develop innovative solutions to address identified limitations - Actively contribute to brainstorming sessions on adjacent topics, bringing fresh perspectives that help peers grow and succeed — and in doing so, build lasting trust across the team - Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions About the team Our team is a group is a diverse group of scientists and engineers passionate about building intelligent machines. We value curiosity, rigor, and a bias for action. We believe in learning from failure and iterating quickly toward solutions that matter.
Senior Applied Scientist, Ad Measurements Science
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of advertiser's ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We also own the science solutions for AI tools that unlock new insights and automate high-effort customer workflows, such as custom query and report generation based on natural language user requests. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. As a Senior Applied Scientist on the team, you will be at the forefront of innovation, developing measurement solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will set the technical vision and innovate on behalf of our customers. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. You will partner with engineering to deploy these solutions into production. You will work with key stakeholders from various business teams to enable advertisers to act upon those metrics. Key job responsibilities * Lead the development of ad measurement models and solutions that address the full spectrum of an advertiser's investment, focusing on scalable and efficient methodologies. * Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams including engineering, product management, and business teams to define and implement measurement solutions. * Use state-of-the-art scientific technologies including Generative AI, Classical Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision to develop state of the art models that measure the impact of ad spend across multiple platforms and timescales. * Drive experimentation and the continuous improvement of ML models through iterative development, testing, and optimization. * Translate complex scientific challenges into clear and impactful solutions for business stakeholders. * Mentor and guide junior scientists, fostering a collaborative and high-performing team culture. * Foster collaborations between scientists to move faster, with broader impact. * Regularly engage with the broader scientific community with presentations, publications, and patents. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate business insights and opportunities, design simulations and 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 advertising organization. You will prepare written and verbal presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. Team video https://advertising.amazon.com/help/G4LNN5YWHP6SM9TJ About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
Senior Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product identity and relationships at unprecedented scale. Using Generative AI, Visual Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal reasoning, we determine what makes each product unique and how products relate to one another across Amazon's catalog. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity—from electronics to groceries to digital content. The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Establishing product identities and groupings requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data—while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily. Amazon's Item and Relationship Platform group is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services to infer product-to-product relationships that matter to our customers. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative 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 algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities include: * Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval—translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks * Design and implement leading models leveraging VLMs, foundation models, and agentic architectures to solve product identity, relationship inference, and catalog understanding at billion-product scale * Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions * Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment—processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks * Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvements * Mentor peer scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor—building organizational capability in GenAI and multimodal AI * Represent the team in the broader science community—publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research
Member Technical Staff - Software Development, Frontier AI Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
In this role, you will act as the primary specialist for physics engine internals and dynamics, developing high-fidelity, vectorized simulation environments for robotics locomotion, navigation, and interaction/manipulation. You will collaborate with hardware engineers to validate robot models and partner with research scientists to ensure numerical stability and physical accuracy for Sim2Real transfer. Your work focuses on tuning solvers, optimizing collision dynamics, and performing system identification to enable the training of robust robot control policies for complex, physical interactions. Key job responsibilities * Develop and maintain the shared simulation software framework, specifically owning the physics integration, robot state management, and control layers * Develop and optimize parallelized (vectorized) physics environments for high-throughput reinforcement learning (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo) * Tune physics engine parameters (solvers, friction, restitution) to support complex contact-rich scenarios required for dexterous manipulation and agile locomotion. * Implement and validate complex robot models (URDF/MJCF) involving precise actuator and sensor modeling * Collaborate with robot engineers and scientists to perform System Identification (SysID) to minimize the Sim2Real gap 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.
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