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 04, 2021
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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”.

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Applied Scientist - Performance Advertising
US, CA, Palo Alto
** This job can be based in Seattle or Palo Alto **Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The SP team's primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!Sponsored Products helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising that grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The Sponsored Products Ad Marketplace organization optimizes the systems and ad placements to match advertiser demand with publisher supply using a combination of machine learning, big data analytics, ultra-low latency high-volume engineering systems, and quantitative product focus. Our systems and algorithms operate on one of the world's largest product catalogs, matching shoppers with products - with a high relevance bar and strict latency constraints. Our goals are to help buyers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and to build a major, sustainable business that helps Amazon continuously innovate on behalf of all customers.As a Senior Applied Scientist for the Sponsored Products Detail Page Allocation and Pricing team, you will own systems which make the final decision on which ads to show, where to place them on the page and how many ads to place. This also includes selection of various themes that would appear in detail pages. This is a challenging technical and business problem, which requires us to balance the interests of advertisers, shoppers, and Amazon. You'll develop a data-driven product strategy to define the right quantitative measures of shopper impact, using this to evaluate decisions and opportunities. You'll balance a portfolio of pragmatic and long-term investments to drive long term growth of the ads and retail businesses.As a Senior Applied Scientist on this team you will:· Act as the technical leader in Machine Learning and drive full life-cycle Machine Learning projects.· Develop real-time algorithms to allocate billions of ads per day in advertising auctions.· Lead technical efforts within this team and across other teams.· Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production.· Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis.· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving.· Work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models.· Research new machine learning approaches.· Recruit Applied Scientists to the team and act as a mentor to other Scientists on the team.Impact and Career Growth:In this role you will have significant impact on this team as well as drive cross team projects that consist of Applied Scientists, Data Scientists, Economists, and Software Development Engineers. This is a highly visible role that will help take our products to the next level. You will work alongside many of the best and brightest science and engineering talent and the work you deliver will have a direct impact on customers and revenue!Why you love this opportunity:Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities.Team video ~ https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE
CV&ML Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
This early-stage initiative is tackling problems that span a variety of domains: computer vision, machine learning, Human-Computer-Interaction and real-time systems.As a Computer Vision Applied Scientist you will help solve a variety of technical challenges and mentor other team members while actively following our entrepreneurial culture that encourages us to wear many hats. You will play an active role in leading translation of business and functional requirements into concrete deliverables. Build quick prototypes and proofs of concept in partnership with other technology leaders within the team. Improve products and concepts as a direct result of your research while delivering significant benefits to business.You are well versed in the relevant literature and will have the ability to find, understand and adapt new state of the art methods from the core discipline as well as beyond to create breakthrough problem-solution pairs. You will tackle challenging, novel situations every day and you’ll have the opportunity to work with other technical teams at Amazon within and outside the organization. You should be comfortable with a degree of ambiguity that’s higher than most projects and relish the idea of solving problems that haven’t been dreamed up and much less solved at scale before - anywhere. Along the way, you’ll learn a ton, have fun and make a positive impact on millions of people.Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.
Alexa Shopping - Senior Data Scientist
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Our Alexa Product Advisor (part of Alexa Shopping) vision is to provide the best possible answers for a wide range of questions around product being asked by the customer. The first step in providing these answers is to form high quality classification and machine understanding of natural language questions into their core components (shape, product references, attributes, pronouns etc).Alexa Shopping is looking for an experienced Sr Data Scientist to be a part of a team solving complex natural language processing problems and customer demand insights (including segmentation analysis and personas building using big data, ML and potentially AI). This is a blue-sky role that gives you a chance to roll up your sleeves and dive into big data sets in order to build simulations and experimentation systems at scale, build optimization algorithms and leverage cutting-edge technologies across Amazon. This is an opportunity to think big about how to solve a challenging problem for the customers and understand their requirements for products.You will work closely with product and technical leaders throughout Alexa Shopping and will be responsible for influencing technical decisions in areas of development/modelling that you identify as critical future product offerings. You will identify both enablers and blockers of adoption for product understanding, and build programs to raise the bar in terms of understanding product questions and predict the shaping of customer utterances as we move from simple to complex utterances.The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Science work, business analytics and have the aptitude to incorporate new approaches and methodologies while dealing with ambiguities in sourcing processes. Excellent business and communication skills are a must to develop and define key business questions and to build data sets that answer those questions. You should have a demonstrated ability to think strategically and analytically about business, product, and technical challenges. Further, you must have the ability to build and communicate compelling value propositions, and work across the organization to achieve consensus. This role requires a strong passion for customers, a high level of comfort navigating ambiguity, and a keen sense of ownership and drive to deliver results.
Senior Applied Scientist
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Performance Advertising sits at the intersection of e-commerce and advertising, developing new native advertising experiences that are a critical area of strategic focus for the company. Amazon Sponsored Brands is an always-on advertising product that amplifies brand content to shoppers researching on Amazon through prominent cost-per-click ads. As we move up the purchase funnel, and create more touch points for shoppers, Sponsored Brands plays a key role in the discoverability and reach of brand content. Amazon Sponsor Brands is looking for a scientist to lead innovation for our global advertising marketplace. At the heart of our advertising business are systems for optimizing the ad marketplace involving sourcing and targeting, experimentation infrastructure, AI methods for inference and control, as well as metrics-driven closed loop optimizations.Job Responsibilities:· Design, develop, and productionize end-to-end machine learning solutions.· Work closely with software engineers and data scientists on detailed requirements, technical designs and implementation of end-to-end solutions in production· Run regular A/B experiments, gather data, perform statistical analysis, and communicate the impact to senior management· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving· Provide technical leadership, research new machine learning approaches to drive continued scientific innovation· Be a member of the Amazon-wide Machine Learning Community, participating in internal and external MeetUps, Hackathons and Conferences· Help attract, lead, and mentor technical talent.Impact and Career Growth:· You will invent new shopper and advertiser experiences, and accelerate the pace of Machine Learning and Optimization.· Influence customer facing shopping experiences to helping suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising, this role will be powering the engine of one the fastest growing businesses at Amazon.· Define a long-term science vision for our ad marketplace, driven fundamentally from the needs of our customers, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This is a role that combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus and business understanding.Why you love this opportunity:Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities.
Principle Applied Scientist
US, VA, Arlington
We are developing advanced technologies that enhance the experience of shoppers in physical stores. Designed and custom-built by Amazon, existing products such as the Amazon Dash Cart and Amazon Go integrate a variety of advanced technologies including computer vision, sensor fusion, and advanced machine learning.We are seeking talented people who want to join an ambitious research and development program that who will help us define the future of physical retail. As a Principle Applied Scientist, you will architect systems that involve addressing complex technical challenges while meeting stringent performance and robustness goals. You will mentor other engineers and ensure they are producing state-of-the-art solutions while also continuing to advance their knowledge and capabilities. You will play an active role in guiding the development of research infrastructure for real-time machine learning and you will play a key role in translating technology solutions into real-world systems in partnership with other product organizations.You will tackle challenging situations every day and you’ll have the opportunity to work with multiple technical teams at Amazon. You should be comfortable with a high degree of ambiguity and have the communication skills necessary to articulate strategic approaches that both address immediate product needs and which set your team up for future success. Along the way, we guarantee that you’ll learn a lot, have fun, and make a positive impact on many customersIn this role:• You will encounter challenging, open-ended technical problems to solve, with solutions that span the entire implementation stack from devices to real-time algorithms to cloud-based services.• You will be able to demonstrate your strong technical and communication skills as well as your leadership abilities to deliver brand new customer experiences on behalf of Amazon.• You must be curious in the face of ambiguity and able to develop prototypes and perform experiments to create robust, scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant features to enhance the experience of Amazon customers around the globe.NOTE re: LOCATION: The main location for this job is the Washington DC metro region.
Sr Mgr, Science Product
US, WA, Seattle
Within Alexa Shopping, we are forming a new, insurgent team to better serve Alexa customers who are less engaged with Amazon stores. This is a large cohort of customers who want to use Alexa as their Shopping assistant and we want to meet the particular needs of these customers. The first job is to understand these customers better, how they shop in and out of Amazon stores, how they use Alexa and Alexa Shopping features, and what gaps remain between their needs and the features we have today.A day in the lifeYou will use data science to better understand how we can fulfill Alexa Shopping’s aspirations to be the anywhere shopping AI for with a focus on customers who are less engaged with Amazon. In the first months on the job, you will hire a new team and undertake a deep dive on this customer cohort using data on Amazon shopping behaviors, Alexa feature usage and primary research on their needs. This deep dive will lead to specific marketing program, feature and product ideas. You will influence the most senior leaders in the Alexa Shopping organization to steer marketing and feature roadmaps in order to better serve these customers. In the first year, you will write several PRFAQs for new feature and product ideas and you will advocate for them at the highest levels of the organization.About the hiring groupAt Alexa Shopping, we strive to enable shopping in everyday life through technology innovations in both voice and screen applications, from organizing shopping to covering in the moment shopping needs. We allow customers to create, add to, and collaborate on shopping lists that can be used in any store and to instantly order whatever they need, by simply interacting with their Smart Devices such as Echo or Fire TV. Our products range from package tracking to shopping lists and instant ordering, and with these capabilities we seek to make advertising more actionable and useful to customers. The business is both focused on generating value for shoppers as well as advertisers.Job responsibilities· Use data science to understand the shopping behaviors and needs of Alexa customers who are less engaged in Amazon stores· Hire and develop a nimble team of insurgents· Identify marketing and product gaps between our current feature portfolio and the needs of this customer cohort· Develop and experiment with product, feature and program ideas (e.g. write PRFAQs) and advocate for them at the highest levels of leadership in the organizationAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Applied Scientist
US, WA, Bellevue
Join us in a historic endeavor to make Computer Vision accessible to the world with breakthrough research!The AWS Computer Vision science team has a world-leading team of researchers and academics, and we are looking for world-class colleagues to join us and make the AI revolution happen. Our team of scientists have developed the algorithms and models that power AWS computer vision services such as Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Textract. As part of the team, we expect that you will develop innovative solutions to hard problems, and publish your findings at peer reviewed conferences and workshops.AWS is the world-leading provider of cloud services, has fostered the creation and growth of countless new businesses, and is a positive force for good. Our customers bring problems which will give Applied Scientists like you endless opportunities to see your research have a positive and immediate impact in the world. You will have the opportunity to partner with technology and business teams to solve real-world problems, have access to virtually endless data and computational resources, and to world-class engineers and developers that can help bring your ideas into the world.Our research themes include, but are not limited to: few-shot learning, transfer learning, unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, active learning and semi-automated data annotation, large scale image and video detection and recognition, face detection and recognition, OCR and scene text recognition, document understanding, and 3D scene and layout understanding.We are located in Seattle, Pasadena, Palo Alto, Atlanta (USA) and in Haifa and Tel Aviv (Israel).Inclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.
Applied Scientist - Personalization
GB, MLN, Edinburgh
We’re looking for a Machine Learning Scientist in the Personalization team for our Edinburgh office. You will be responsible for developing and disseminating customer-facing personalized recommendation algorithms. This is a hands-on role with global impact working with a team of world-class engineers and scientists across the Edinburgh offices and wider organization.You will design deep learning algorithms that scale to very large quantities of data, and serve high-scale low-latency recommendations to all customers worldwide. You will embody scientific rigor, designing and executing experiments to demonstrate the technical efficacy and business value of your methods. You will work alongside more senior team members to delight customers by aiding in recommendations relevancy, and raise the profile of Amazon as a global leader in machine learning and personalization.Successful candidates will have strong technical ability, focus on customers by applying a customer-first approach, excellent teamwork and communication skills, and a motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. Our position offers exceptional opportunities for every candidate to grow their technical and non-technical skills. If you are selected, you have the opportunity to make a difference to our business by designing and building state of the art machine learning systems on big data, leveraging Amazon’s vast computing resources (AWS), working on exciting and challenging projects, and delivering meaningful results to customers world-wide.Key responsibilities· Develop deep learning algorithms for high-scale recommendations problem· Rapidly design, prototype and test many possible hypotheses in a high-ambiguity environment, making use of both quantitative analysis and business judgement.· Collaborate with software engineering teams to integrate successful experimental results into large-scale, highly complex Amazon production systems capable of handling 100,000s of transactions per second at low latency.· Report results in a manner which is both statistically rigorous and compellingly relevant, exemplifying good scientific practice in a business environment.
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