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, Mobile Manipulation Robotics (I/O)
US, MA, North Reading
Amazon Robotics is transforming warehouse automation through edge AI and machine learning applied to real-world robotics challenges. We're seeking a Applied Scientist to advance our mobile manipulation capabilities by developing learning-based approaches that enable robots to navigate and manipulate objects in dynamic fulfillment environments. This role offers the opportunity to apply state-of-the-art research to production systems operating at Amazon's unprecedented scale. Key job responsibilities - Model Development and Training: Designing and implementing the model architectures, training and fine tuning the models using various datasets, and optimize the model performance through iterative experiments - Data Management: Process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines. - Experimentation and Validation: Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance. - Code Development: Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Research: Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Collaboration: Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies. A day in the life Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart, collaborative team of enthusiastic doers that work passionately to apply innovative advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even image yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun!
Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform
US, WA, Seattle
Interested in setting the scientific vision for how every product at Amazon is understood, identified, and connected, with the opportunity to impact every Amazon customer and every selling partner? The Items and Relationships Platform is the foundation that establishes what every product in Amazon’s catalog is and how products relate to one another. We are rebuilding the platform to establish identity and relationships from meaning and context, using multimodal large language models and generative AI. This is a foundational problem: understanding products deeply enough to identify them, relate them, and keep the catalog trustworthy as it scales to the full breadth of Amazon’s global contribution traffic. A Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform owns the science direction for product identity and product relationships. It spans how contributions are resolved into a committed product identity, how products are connected into structural relationships (variations, multipacks, newer versions, lines of products, bundles), how confident those decisions are, and how their quality is measured. You will own the strategy for multimodal understanding, representation learning, relationship inference, calibration, and evaluation, so that science capability compounds across identity and relationships rather than being built one use case at a time. This role lives at the intersection of research and production. Product identity and relationships are fundamentally an entity resolution problem: deciding what is the same product, and how different products relate, across diverse sources, languages, and formats. You will make the hard modeling calls on where sameness ends and relatedness begins, how models express and calibrate confidence, and how the platform measures quality when there is no external ground truth. Successful candidates are passionate about translating ambiguous business goals into a coherent science roadmap that enables many businesses at once. You are comfortable being the final scientific arbiter on hard cross-team decisions, and working alongside top-notch applied scientists and software engineers to turn advanced research into production systems. Key job responsibilities As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform, you will: - Own the science direction for product identity: define how products are semantically understood, resolved, and committed as coherent identities, navigating the precision/recall and friction/selection trade-offs inherent in every decision - Build representations that decide both sameness and typed relatedness, and drive relationship inference from semantic identity rather than one pipeline per relationship type - Own structural relationship science across variations, multipacks and base products, newer versions, lines of products, and bundles, and discover new relationship types from the gap between defined policy and what identity reveals - Own calibration and evaluation science: define how models emit calibrated confidence, and build the LLM judge methodology and Catalog Identity Quality metric that measure identity and relationship quality at catalog scale - Partner with Principal Engineers on cost-aware modeling (cascades, distillation, routing) and close the loop from production signals and corrections back into training - Set science direction partnering with ACCS Applied Science teams, mentoring senior and principal-track scientists, and driving the documentation and publication of scientific innovation A day in the life On a typical day, you move between setting science direction and going deep on hard problems: reviewing a multimodal identity model or a relationship inference experiment with scientists, deciding how a borderline case (a multipack, a newer version, a near-identical variant) should be modeled, and pressure-testing whether a quality gain is real by examining the judge and its calibration. You also spend time zoomed out, shaping the longer-term science roadmap, aligning with Principal Engineers and partner teams on the identity and relationship signals they consume, and mentoring scientists as they take on the ambiguous, high-impact problems that define the platform’s future. About the team The Items and Relationships Platform advances state-of-the-art GenAI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and meaningfully connect every product at Amazon scale. We build the canonical product identity, matching, and relationship systems that power Amazon’s universal catalog: eliminating duplicates, preventing abuse, keeping product families coherent, and integrating the world’s product data to power agentic shopping and trusted discovery for customers worldwide. We solve foundational challenges including schema-agnostic multimodal understanding, relationship inference, evaluation without ground truth, and efficient inference at reduced cost.
Senior Data Scientist, Amazon Leo
US, WA, Redmond
Amazon Leo is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to transform complex satellite, network, and customer terminal telemetry into actionable insights that drive system performance, reliability, and engineering decisions. In this role, you will work with large-scale datasets generated across satellite payloads, ground infrastructure, customer terminals, and end-to-end laboratory and on-orbit testing environments. You will develop analytical models, statistical methods, and automated data processing solutions to identify performance trends, detect anomalies, isolate issues, and support system validation and operational readiness. You will partner closely with systems, hardware, software, RF, and test engineering teams to establish meaningful performance metrics, correlate telemetry across multiple system components, and translate complex technical data into clear recommendations. Your work will directly influence engineering priorities, test strategies, system improvements, and launch readiness decisions. The ideal candidate combines strong statistical and data science expertise with practical experience analyzing complex engineering systems, processing high-volume time-series data, and developing scalable analytical solutions. Experience in satellite communications, wireless networks, or telecommunications is highly desirable. Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be 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. Key job responsibilities - Develop and maintain scalable data processing and analytical solutions for satellite payload, ground network, customer terminal, and laboratory test telemetry. - Analyze large volumes of structured and unstructured data to identify system performance trends, anomalies, degradation, and potential failure conditions. - Correlate telemetry across satellite payloads, RF systems, networking infrastructure, customer terminals, and application-level measurements to identify relationships and isolate root causes. - Design statistical models, machine learning techniques, and predictive analytics to detect anomalies, characterize system behavior, and identify emerging reliability or performance issues. - Establish performance baselines, key performance indicators (KPIs), and statistical methodologies to evaluate system functionality, reliability, and performance across laboratory and on-orbit environments. - Analyze automated test results, test campaign data, and regression trends to identify software and hardware performance changes, recurring failures, and gaps in test coverage. - Develop dashboards, automated reports, and visualization tools that enable engineering teams and leadership to understand system health, performance, and readiness. - Apply statistical analysis and experimental design to compare software releases, hardware configurations, and system changes, quantifying their impact on end-to-end performance. - Translate complex telemetry and analytical findings into actionable engineering recommendations that influence test priorities, troubleshooting, product improvements, and operational decisions. - Collaborate across multiple engineering organizations to define data requirements, improve telemetry quality, and develop consistent analytical methodologies. - Lead the development of reusable analytical frameworks and scalable solutions that improve engineering efficiency, reduce manual investigation, and accelerate decision-making. - Mentor engineers and data scientists in statistical methods, telemetry analysis, data interpretation, and data-driven problem-solving.
Applied Scientist, PXT Central Science
US, WA, Seattle
The People eXperience Technology (PXT) Central Science (PXTCS)'s mission is to make PXT the most scientific, technologically proficient, and inclusive HR organization in the world. PXTCS does this by accelerating scientific rigor in business-led initiatives, working backwards from employee experience, and delivering science-driven products that improve the well-being of and value of work for Amazonian worldwide. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to build production machine learning systems that turn Amazon's employee listening signals into insight at scale. You will design, develop, and deploy ML solutions that transform large volumes of employee feedback — survey responses, free-text comments, and other listening channels — into signals that drive strategic decision-making across the organization. In this role, you will work on challenging problems spanning natural language processing, large language models, predictive modeling, and generative AI applications applied to employee experience. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate ambiguous business challenges into rigorous technical solutions. Key job responsibilities - Apply and adapt state-of-the-art NLP and machine learning techniques to extract structured, reliable signals from employee listening data (surveys, free-text feedback, and related channels), using reasonable assumptions, data, and customer requirements. - Design, develop, and implement small-to-medium ML components on top of the employee listening system — such as theme and sentiment extraction, text classification, and aggregated signal generation — with input and guidance from senior scientists, taking ownership of the code in your components. - Write secure, stable, testable, maintainable, well-reviewed code (at the SDE I bar) to deliver solutions into production that benefit customers and the business. - Design features and signals responsibly, applying privacy-preserving practices appropriate to sensitive employee data. - Collaborate with cross-functional partners to understand business context and impact, and help mentor interns. - Communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from technical peers to senior leadership. About the team The People eXperience and Technology Central Science Team (PXTCS) uses economics, applied science, statistics, and machine learning to proactively identify mechanisms and process improvements which simultaneously improve Amazon and the lives, wellbeing, and the value of work to Amazonians. We build and apply science on top of Amazon's employee listening systems — turning what Amazonians tell us into products and insights that improve their experience. We are an interdisciplinary team that combines the talents of science and engineering to develop and deliver solutions that measurably achieve this goal.
Principal Applied Scientist, Frontier AI Assets , Frontier AI Assets
US, CA, Sunnyvale
The Frontier AI Assets (FAI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Principal Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning and reinforcement learning background to build the training and evaluation assets that advance frontier Generative AI (GenAI) with Large Language Models (LLMs). AI models become more capable largely because of the learning environments, the RL gyms, in which they are trained. FAI builds those gyms and the platform that certifies them, so that model training teams across Amazon can rely on high-quality, graded assets. As a Principal on this team, you will set the technical direction for how these gyms and the tooling around them are built, evaluated, and scaled. Key job responsibilities As a Principal Applied Scientist with FAI, you will: •Set technical direction across data collection, sampling, and evaluation for RL gyms focused on agentic tool use across a range of real-world domains. •Design and lead experiments that produce reliable, efficient signal on what drives model improvement. •Build gym-building tooling and automated quality control that scale with demand. •Advance the science of how gyms are evaluated and validated before they're used in model training. •Act as a hands-on technical leader: produce exemplary, high-quality assets yourself, and audit and support more junior scientists and engineers. •Partner closely with domain experts and cross-functional teams, turning real-world problems into challenging, high-value tasks. •Lead scientific reviews, scrutinize experimental design and verification, probe assumptions, and align teams toward coherent strategies. Contribute to hiring, mentorship, and the development of other scientists. About the team The FAI team has the mission to push the envelope in GenAI with LLMs, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers. We build frontier training and evaluation assets, RL gyms and the certification platform behind them, that directly shape how Amazon's models are trained and improved. We value scientific depth, hands-on building, and turning research into measurable impact at scale.
Senior Research Scientist, RBS Tech
IN, KA, Bengaluru
RBS (Retail Business Services) Tech team works towards enhancing the customer experience (CX) and their trust in product data by providing technologies to find and fix Amazon CX defects at scale. Our platforms help in improving the CX in all phases of customer journey, including selection, discoverability & fulfilment, buying experience and post-buying experience (product quality and customer returns). The team also develops GenAI platforms for automation of Amazon Stores Operations. As a Sciences team in RBS Tech, we focus on foundational ML research and develop scalable state-of-the-art ML solutions to solve the problems covering customer experience (CX) and Selling partner experience (SPX). We work to solve problems related to multi-modal understanding (text and images), task automation through multi-modal LLM Agents, supervised and unsupervised techniques, multi-task learning, multi-label classification, aspect and topic extraction for Customer Anecdote Mining, image and text similarity and retrieval using NLP and Computer Vision for product groupings and identifying duplicate listings in product search results Key job responsibilities As a Senior Research Scientist, you will be responsible to design and deploy scalable GenAI, NLP and Computer Vision solutions that will impact the content visible to millions of customer and solve key customer experience issues. You will develop novel LLM, deep learning and statistical techniques for task automation, text processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and anomaly detection problems. You will define the research and experiments strategy with an iterative execution approach to develop AI/ML models and progressively improve the results over time. You will partner with business and engineering teams to identify and solve large and significantly complex problems that require scientific innovation. You will help the team leverage your expertise, by coaching and mentoring. You will contribute to the professional development of colleagues, improving their technical knowledge and the engineering practices. You will independently as well as guide team to file for patents and/or publish research work where opportunities arise. The RBS org deals with problems that are directly related to the selling partners and end customers and the ML team drives resolution to organization level problems. Therefore, the Senior Research Scientist role will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction which is very exciting.
Applied Scientist, Amazon Robotics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon Robotics is seeking an exceptional Applied Scientist to join our Foundation Models and Agentic AI team. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of large vision-language-action (VLA) models, reasoning and task planning models, and reinforcement learning. At Amazon Robotics, we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. We are pioneering the development of robotics foundation models that: - Enable unprecedented generalization across diverse tasks - Integrate multi-modal learning capabilities (visual, depth, force, tactile, linguistic) - Accelerate policy skill acquisition through imitation learning and reinforcement learning - Enhance robotic perception and environmental understanding - Streamline development processes through reusable capabilities The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Applied AI and Robotics Foundations Model team, you will: - Model Development and Training: Designing and implementing the model architectures, training and fine tuning the foundation models using various datasets, and optimize the model performance through iterative experiments - Data Management: Process and prepare training data, including data governance, provenance tracking, data quality checks and creating reusable data pipelines. - Experimentation and Validation: Design and execute experiments to test model capabilities on the simulator and on the embodiment, validate performance across different scenarios, create a baseline and iteratively improve model performance. - Code Development: Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Research: Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Collaboration: Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies. A day in the life Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: - Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage - Maternity and Parental Leave Options - Paid Time Off (PTO) - 401(k) Plan If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply! About the team Are you inspired by invention? Is problem solving through teamwork in your DNA? Do you like the idea of seeing how your work impacts the bigger picture? Answer yes to any of these and you’ll fit right in here at Amazon Robotics. We are a smart, collaborative team of enthusiastic doers that work passionately to apply innovative advances in robotics and software to solve real-world challenges that will transform our customers’ experiences in ways we can’t even image yet. We invent new improvements every day. We are Amazon Robotics and we will give you the tools and support you need to invent with us in ways that are rewarding, fulfilling and fun.
Sr Applied Scientist, Amazon Shipping
IN, HR, Gurugram
Lead ML teams building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. As an Sr Applied Scientist, you will set scientific direction, mentor applied scientists, and partner with engineering and product leaders to deliver production-grade ML solutions at massive scale. Key job responsibilities 1. Lead and grow a high-performing team of Applied Scientists, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and career development. 2. Define and own the scientific vision and roadmap for ML solutions powering large-scale transportation planning and execution. 3. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 4. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 5. Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 6. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing. A day in the life Your day includes reviewing model performance and business metrics, guiding technical design and experimentation, mentoring scientists, and driving roadmap execution. You’ll balance near-term delivery with long-term innovation while ensuring solutions are robust, interpretable, and scalable. Ultimately, your work helps improve delivery reliability, reduce costs, and enhance the customer experience at massive scale.
Applied Scientist, North America Sort Centers, Amazon Transportation Services, North America Sort Centers, Amazon Transportation Services
US, WA, Bellevue
Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and when that box with the smile arrived you wondered how it got to you so fast? Have you wondered where it came from and how much it cost Amazon to deliver it to you? Have you also wondered what are different ways that the transportation assets can be used to delight the customer even more. If so, the Amazon transportation Services, North America Sort Center Science team is for you . We manage the delivery of tens of millions of products every week to Amazon’s customers, achieving on-time delivery in a cost-effective manner. We are looking for an enthusiastic, customer obsessed Applied Scientist with strong scientific thinking, good software and statistics experience, skills to help manage projects and operations, improve metrics, and develop scalable processes and tools. The primary role of an Applied Scientist within Amazon is to address business challenges through building a compelling case, and using data to influence change across the organization. This individual will be given responsibility on their first day to own those business challenges and the autonomy to think strategically and make data driven decisions. Decisions and tools made in this role will have significant impact to the customer experience, as it will have a major impact on how we operate the middle mile network. Ideal candidates will be a high potential, strategic and analytic graduate with a PhD in (Operations Research, Statistics, Engineering, and Supply Chain) ready for challenging opportunities in the core of our world class operations space. Great candidates have a history of operations research, machine learning , and the ability to use data and research to make changes. This role requires robust skills in research and implementation of scalable products and models . This individual will need to be able to work with a team, but also be comfortable making decisions independently, in what is often times an ambiguous environment. Key job responsibilities Key job responsibilities - Design and develop advanced mathematical optimization and machine learning solutions in the domains of network design and optimization. - Research, prototype, simulate, and experiment with these models using programming languages such as Java and Python; participate in the production level deployment. - Create, enhance, and maintain technical documentation and science designs. - Present to other Scientists, Product, and Software Engineering teams, as well as Stakeholders. - Lead project plans from a scientific perspective by managing product features, technical risks, milestones and launch plans.
Applied Scientist II, Prime Video - Ads Science
US, WA, Seattle
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 programming from Prime Video subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities The science challenges include: - Heterogeneous customer responses. The same customer responds differently to ads depending on what they’re watching, how engaged they are, and their broader streaming context. We need to understand and predict this variation to make better advertising decisions in real time. - Signal sparsity in streaming. Unlike search or retail advertising, streaming offers no clicks, no conversions, and limited direct feedback. We must develop creative approaches to infer customer preferences, intent, and tolerance from indirect behavioral signals. - Personalization at scale. A one-size-fits-all ad experience leaves value on the table for both customers and the business. We build systems that adapt ad load, placement, and content to individual viewers across 100M+ customers and 100k+ titles. - Small effects, large variance. Ad interventions typically produce 0.1-2% shifts in engagement, effects easily overwhelmed by natural behavioral variance. Measuring, attributing, and optimizing these small signals requires rigorous experimental design and causal methodologies. - Competing objectives. Revenue, customer engagement, long-term retention, and advertiser value are in tension. We develop principled frameworks to navigate these tradeoffs and optimize for sustainable outcomes rather than any single metric. A day in the life - Contribute to the research and development of ML models that personalize advertising decisions for 100M+ customers across 100k+ titles, with production deployment in mind - Develop deep learning architectures (multi-task learning, embedding-based representations) for customer behavior prediction at scale - Design and analyze large-scale A/B experiments, applying causal inference techniques to measure and optimize the impact of ad strategies on customer engagement and monetization - Partner with engineering to ensure models meet production latency and scalability requirements - Collaborate with product managers to frame business problems as tractable ML problems and translate findings into product decisions - Shape the team’s scientific roadmap, identifying high-impact research directions About the team Prime Video Ads is pioneering the use of Generative AI, Deep Learning and Causal ML to empower the next generation of Ads experience in Prime Video. Our vision is to build the world’s most valuable and differentiated ad-supported streaming platform: one where every ad is relevant to the viewer, and every dollar spent by an advertiser delivers measurable results. We are seeking lead applied scientists who have demonstrated experience in advancing state of the art ML algorithms, particularly in Personalization, Relevance, Casual Inference and Gen-AI areas. Your role will be to deliver these innovations as production-ready systems at Amazon 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