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Amazon Science Community and Machine Learning University call for proposals - Spring 2022

Making Amazon the best place in the world to do customer-obsessed science and engineering

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About this CFP

The Amazon Science Community and Machine Learning University teams are committed to making Amazon the best place in the world to do customer-obsessed science and engineering. Our programs, including onboarding bootcamps, mentorship programs, and instructor-led classes, help Amazon’s scientists and engineers do their best work. We aim to advance the state of the art in the design and execution of these programs. We are seeking to fund economics and social science research on the following topics:

  • Scientific productivity metrics – high quality science can take years to develop and have a customer impact; how can we know in the meantime if a research team is flourishing or floundering?
  • Scientific impact metrics – scientific work not only operates on long timelines, it has a cumulative effect.  One research paper may not get turned into a product or service, but it can serve as critical inspiration for the next research paper that does.  How can we assess the impact of a given research project, team, or individual, beyond basic tools like citation and patent metrics?
  • Team-based research success factors – impactful science is increasingly done by teams; research teams to create the science, and engineering teams to implement scientific solutions on behalf of customers.  What are the most critical factors that cause a team to have scientific success, and what mechanisms can influence them?
  • Individual-based research success factors – what are the key factors to individual scientific success, and which of these are a product of the institutional environment?  How can we optimize the physical and social environment to allow scientists to do their best work?
  • Educational design – what drives success in technical courses when presented in-person, live remote, or self-paced?  What drives students to choose one option or the other, and how can we leverage hybrid formats to bring together the strengths of each of these?  What are the data-driven best practices for online education, particularly with regards to recent shifts in working practices?  How do we measure practical success when teaching scientific knowledge at scale?

Timeline

Submission period: June 3 - July 8, 2022

Decision letters will be sent out December 2022

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD
  • AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $20,000 USD
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the FAQ page.

Proposal requirements

Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template.

PIs should either include plans for open source contributions or state that they do not plan to make any open source contributions (data or code) under the proposed effort.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community and quality of the scientific content.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

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Applied Scientist, GenAI Catalog Intelligence, PRISM
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon's PRISM team is seeking an innovative Applied Scientist to build the intelligence layer powering the Catalog Diagnostic Assistant — a conversational AI agent that unifies Amazon's fragmented catalog diagnostic experience into a single natural-language interface. Rather than switching between legacy tools, internal users ask CDA a question in plain language and CDA coordinates across data sources, reasons through complex diagnostic workflows, and returns a combined answer with source citations. This role sits at the intersection of Generative AI, agentic architectures, and large-scale information retrieval applied to the world's largest product catalog. You will design and build the scientific core of an agent that autonomously investigates catalog anomalies — diagnosing why products aren't live, why attributes aren't publishing, or why matching decisions went wrong — across billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, and dozens of marketplaces. You will be the founding scientist for the CDA product, defining the research agenda for agentic diagnostics, developing novel approaches to skill-based reasoning and tool orchestration, and owning the full lifecycle from problem formulation through production deployment at Amazon scale. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog and tackle problems at the frontier of AI research. Key job responsibilities - Formulate open research problems at the intersection of GenAI, agentic reasoning, and large-scale catalog diagnostics — defining how an autonomous agent should decompose, investigate, and explain complex catalog issues - Design and develop novel agentic architectures (skill planning, tool selection, multi-step reasoning, chain-of-thought verification) that enable CDA to autonomously resolve diagnostic workflows that traditionally required manual expert investigation - Build and optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems over Amazon's catalog data, ensuring the agent retrieves the right evidence from the right data sources to ground its diagnostic answers - Advance the science of efficient model deployment — developing distillation, compression, and LLM serving optimization strategies that preserve diagnostic reasoning quality in production-grade architectures while reducing latency and cost - Make frontier models reliable for autonomous decisions — advancing uncertainty calibration, confidence estimation, and interpretability methods so CDA's agentic diagnoses can be trusted at scale - Own the full research lifecycle from problem formulation through production deployment — designing rigorous experiments, iterating rapidly, and seeing your research directly improve diagnostic accuracy and coverage - Partner closely with CDA engineers to translate research prototypes into production systems serving thousands of daily diagnostic sessions - Shape the team's research vision by defining technical roadmaps that balance foundational scientific inquiry with measurable product impact - Mentor engineers on advanced ML/GenAI techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor About the team We are a GenAI science team within Amazon's Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS) organization. Our mission is to advance state-of-the-art Generative AI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and intelligently diagnose every product at Amazon scale. We push the boundaries of multimodal LLMs, agentic systems, and generative AI to solve foundational catalog challenges — from product identity and semantic matching to automated catalog diagnostics and intelligent catalog analytics. Our scientists work across multiple high-impact problem spaces: establishing canonical product identity across billions of items, powering next-generation agentic experiences for catalog operations, and building AI systems that make Amazon's catalog self-diagnosing and self-healing. We operate at the frontier of AI research applied at unprecedented scale — petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity. This is a collaborative, fast-moving 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 ideas at scale, and publish your findings at top venues.
Member of Technical Staff - Robotics Mechanical Engineer, Frontier AI & Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
We are seeking a Member of Technical Staff — Mechanical Engineer to lead the structural and electromechanical design of advanced high degree-of-freedom robotic systems within a frontier AI and robotics research lab. You will own the mechanical architecture of our robotics platform end-to-end: actuator selection, joint design, thermal management, cable routing, sensing integration, and structural optimization — all under the demanding constraints of a high-DoF system that must be lightweight, robust, and production-viable. This is a unique opportunity to define the physical design direction of a next-generation robotics platform from first principles. The ideal candidate has deep experience designing complex robotic systems and scaling hardware from concept through prototyping to production. You thrive on analytical problem solving, possess strong intuition for structural and electromechanical tradeoffs, and are equally comfortable in CAD and on the shop floor. You will be the technical lead of a small team of talented mechanical engineers while collaborating closely with electrical, firmware, controls, and AI research teams to set the mechanical and structural direction of the platform. Beyond core platform development, this role offers real latitude to push into novel territory — novel actuation methods, advanced sensor integration, or new approaches to mechatronic packaging. If you have research instincts alongside shipping discipline, you'll find an environment that rewards both. We're looking for someone who wants to be the technical authority on how a high-performance robot is physically built, not just a contributor to the effort. What You Bring: - A systems-thinking mindset with a strong grasp of cross-domain engineering tradeoffs. - A bias toward action: comfortable building, testing, and iterating rapidly. - A collaborative and communicative working style — especially in multi-disciplinary research environments. - A passion for robotics and advancing the state of the art in intelligent, capable machines. Key job responsibilities - Lead mechanical design of robotic subsystems and full platforms, including structures, joints, enclosures, and mechanisms for a research environment. - Own kinematic, dynamic, and structural analyses to guide the design and optimization of full systems and subsystems of high-DoF robots - Specify and integrate actuators and motors for high-torque density applications in high-degree-of-freedom systems. - Drive rapid iteration and prototyping cycles — from concept sketches through functional hardware — to accelerate learning and compress development timelines in a fast-paced R&D environment. - Partner with the AI research team to establish simulation pipelines that enable rapid exploration of mechanical design space, informing actuator choices, structural topology, and system-level tradeoffs before committing to physical builds. - Contribute to thermal management strategies for motors, sensors, and embedded compute hardware. - Integrate sensors such as lidar, stereo cameras, IMUs, tactile sensors, and compute modules into compact, functional assemblies. - Design and route cabling and wire harnesses, ensuring reliability, serviceability, and thermal/electrical integrity. - Prototype and test mechanical systems; support hands-on builds, debug sessions, and field testing. - Conduct root cause analysis on system-level failures or performance issues and implement design improvements. - Apply Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA) principles to transition prototypes into scalable builds (10s–100s of units). - Collaborate with cross-functional teams in electrical engineering, controls, perception, and research to meet research and product goals. About the team Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) is the team at Amazon building the next generation of embodied intelligence. FAR drives the development and implementation of advanced AI models within Amazon’s operations that enable robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them, supporting a number of different warehouse automation tasks.
Applied Scientist , Amazon Customer Service
US, WA, Seattle
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join a science team within Amazon Customer Service that is reimagining how customers are connected with the right support experience. This is a role at the intersection of representation learning, behavioral modeling, and large-scale experimentation where you will see your science deployed in production systems serving real-time decisions. Key job responsibilities - Develop machine learning models that capture how service associates perform across different problem types and how their capabilities evolve over time - Power intelligent routing decisions across hundreds of millions of annual customer contacts - Directly improve both customer experience and associate satisfaction through model-driven decisions - Work at the intersection of representation learning, behavioral modeling, and large-scale experimentation - Deploy science into production systems serving real-time decisions
Manager, Applied Science, 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). 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 visual), supervised and unsupervised techniques, multi-task learning, multi-label classification, aspect and topic extraction for Customer Anecdote Mining, product similarity, using GenAI, LLMs, NLP and Computer Vision. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Science Manager, 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 Lead scientists on the team and oversee research and development projects at various stages ranging from initial exploration to deployment into production systems. 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 create the environment in the team to file for patents and/or publish research work where opportunities arise. You will impact the large product strategy, identifies new business opportunities and provides strategic direction to the team.
Senior Applied Scientist, International Machine Learning
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions for providing better value to Amazon’s customers? Do you want to build and deploy advanced algorithmic systems that help optimize millions of transactions every day? Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics and directly impact the profitability of the company? Do you like to innovate and simplify? If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Machine Learning and Data Sciences team for India Consumer Businesses. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, know how to deliver, love to work with data, are deeply technical, highly innovative and long for the opportunity to build solutions to challenging problems that directly impact the company's bottom-line, we want to talk to you. Major responsibilities - Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems - Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes - Design, development, evaluate and deploy innovative and highly scalable models for predictive learning - Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches - Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations - Work closely with business owners and operations staff to optimize various business operations - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation - Mentor other scientists and engineers in the use of ML techniques Key job responsibilities Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes Design, develop, evaluate and deploy, innovative and highly scalable ML models Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations Work closely with business partners to identify problems and propose machine learning solutions Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model maintenance Work proactively with engineering teams and product managers to evangelize new algorithms and drive the implementation of large-scale complex ML models in production Leading projects and mentoring other scientists, engineers in the use of ML techniques About the team International Machine Learning Team is responsible for building novel ML solutions that attack India first (and other Emerging Markets across MENA and LatAm) problems and impact the bottom-line and top-line of India business. Learn more about our team from https://www.amazon.science/working-at-amazon/how-rajeev-rastogis-machine-learning-team-in-india-develops-innovations-for-customers-worldwide
Economist, Stores Economics and Science
US, WA, Seattle
This role will develop Economic and Econometric models and thought leadership on projects that span our business, with a particular focus on supply chain and inventory selection. Through the lens of economics, you will develop a deeper understanding of how customers value our selection and interact with Amazon's store to make shopping easier. You will be a key scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to evaluate selection and understand customers. You will work on developing frameworks and scaleable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policies for Amazon's business. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Supply Chain, Operations, Retail, FBA, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. Ability to incorporate AI tools and methods into your work is highly valued. They will work closely with Economists, Data/Applied Scientists, Software Engineers and Product Managers to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
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