AWS AI call for proposals — Fall 2024

Advancing the frontiers of machine learning.

About this CFP

AWS offers a broad and deep set of tools for businesses to create impactful machine learning solutions faster. Our mission is to share our learnings and ML capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every scientist and developer.

AWS AI aims to advance machine learning research by funding development of open-source tools and research that benefit the machine learning community at large, or impactful research that uses machine learning tools.

We welcome proposals related to machine learning in the areas below:

  1. Generative AI
  2. Governance and responsible AI
  3. Distributed training
  4. Machine learning compilers and compiler based optimizations

Other applied machine learning topics are also welcome.

Timeline

Submission period: September 25, 2024 - November 13, 2024 (11:59PM Pacific Time)

Decision letters will be sent out in March 2025

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $70,000 USD on average
  • AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $50,000 USD on average
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Amazon Research Awards (ARA) 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 Rules and Eligibility page.

Proposal requirements

Proposals for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 5 pages, not including Appendices. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:

  1. Please list the open-source tools you plan to contribute to.
  2. Please list the AWS ML tools you will use.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community, quality of the scientific content. We encourage research that uses machine learning tools, for example AWS AI/ML services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon AI services, Amazon Bedrock).

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.

When you're ready to submit your proposal, use the button below and follow the instructions on the site.

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US, NY, New York
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US, WA, Bellevue
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These systems operate at various scales, from real-time decision system that completes thousands of transactions per seconds, to large scale distributed system that optimize Amazon’s fulfilment network. Your tech solution will have large impacts to the physical supply chain of Amazon, and play a key role in improving Amazon consumer business’s long-term profitability. If you are interested in diving into a multi-discipline, high impact space this is the team for you. We’re looking for a passionate, results-oriented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist who can create and improve optimization models for our outbound transportation planning and execution systems. In addition, you will be working on design, development and evaluation of highly innovative Optimization models for solving complex business problems in the area of outbound transportation planning systems. Watch http://bit.ly/amazon-scot to get the big picture. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will propose and deploy solutions that will likely draw from a range of scientific areas such as Optimization, machine learning, advanced statistical modeling, and graph models. You will be on the forefront of supply chain thought leadership by working on some of the most difficult problems in the industry, with some of the best product managers, research scientists, statisticians, and software engineers to integrate scientific work into production systems. You will bring deep technical expertise in the area of Mathematical Optimization, and play an integral part in building Amazon's Fulfillment Optimization systems. Other responsibilities include: * Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative Math models for solving complex business problems. * Research and apply the latest Optimization techniques and best practices from both academia and industry. * Think about customers and how to improve the customer delivery experience. * Use and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems. * Work closely with software engineering teams to build model implementations and integrate successful models and algorithms in production systems at very large scale. * Technically lead and mentor other scientists in team. * Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation. A day in the life This is a great role for someone who likes to learn new things. You will have the opportunity to learn all about how Amazon plans for and executes within its logistics network including Fulfillment Centres, Air Stations, Sort Centres, Delivery Stations, and more. You will need to meet with many internal customers to understand their business and their challenges as you develop an effective solution to enable us to collectively scale. Our leadership is very interested in this effort so you will find lots of opportunities to get your ideas and plans in front of them for evaluation and alignment. We are seeking someone who wants to lead projects that require innovative thinking and deep technical problem-solving skills to create production-ready mathematical optimization solutions. A successful candidate is able to quickly approach large ambiguous problems, turn high-level business requirements into mathematical models, identify the right solution approach, and contribute to the software development for production systems. Successful candidates must thrive in fast-paced environments, which encourage collaborative and creative problem solving, be able to measure and estimate risks, constructively critique peer research, and align research focuses with the Amazon's strategic needs. We look for individuals who know how to deliver results and show a desire to develop themselves, their colleagues, and their career. About the team Fulfillment Planning & Execution Science team contains a group of scientists with different technical backgrounds including Operations Research and Machine Learning who will collaborate closely with you on your projects. Our team directly supports critical functional areas across Fulfillment Optimization and the research needs of the corresponding product and engineering teams. We tackle some of the most mathematically complex challenges in facility and transportation planning and execution to improve Amazon's operational efficiency worldwide and at a scale that is unique to Amazon. We often seek the opportunity of applying hybrid techniques in the space of Operations Research and Machine Learning to tackle some of our biggest technical challenges. We disambiguate complex supply chain problems and create solutions to solve those problems at scale.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Cross-Border (XB) Science & Analytics team is at the heart of Amazon's international marketplace expansion, powering science-driven solutions that enable customers across 20+ countries to discover and purchase products seamlessly across borders. Our work directly impacts millions in annualized business value through ML models, algorithms, and data-driven systems that solve some of Amazon's most complex cross-border challenges. We are a lean, high-impact team of scientists working across various programs spanning search ranking, demand forecasting, pricing optimization, product recommendations, language understanding, and generative AI. We partner closely with product, engineering, and business teams across Amazon's global retail organization to take science from ideation to production at scale. Key job responsibilities We are looking for a passionate and technically strong Applied Scientist to join our team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy machine learning models and algorithms that directly improve the cross-border shopping experience for millions of Amazon customers worldwide. You will work on challenging, ambiguous problems—from improving search relevance across languages to building ML-powered pricing and recommendation systems—with significant autonomy and end-to-end ownership. This is a hands-on, high-visibility role. You will publish your research internally and externally, collaborate with world-class scientists and engineers, and see your work go live across Amazon's global marketplaces. A day in the life Research & Experimentation Analyze large-scale datasets to identify patterns, formulate hypotheses, and design experiments Develop and iterate on ML models (deep learning, NLP, ranking, causal inference) to improve cross-border product discovery, relevance, and conversion Design and run A/B experiments on live traffic to measure model impact against business and customer metrics Building & Shipping Write production-quality code (Python, Java/Scala) and work with SDEs to deploy models into real-time and batch inference pipelines Build end-to-end ML pipelines—from data ingestion and feature engineering to training, evaluation, and online serving Own model monitoring, performance debugging, and iterative improvements post-launch Collaboration & Communication Participate in weekly science syncs, design reviews, and cross-functional standups with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders Translate business problems into well-defined science problems, and communicate results and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences Contribute to technical documentation—architecture wikis, experiment write-ups, and model cards Growth & Community Present at internal ML paper reading sessions and science forums Stay current with state-of-the-art research (NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, KDD) and bring new ideas to the team Mentor junior scientists and interns; participate in hiring interviews and debriefs Publish findings in top-tier venues and file patents where applicable
US, NY, New York
Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The 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. The Creative X org within Amazon Advertising builds the science that decides what is in an ad creative and whether that creative is good, safe, and on-brand. As advertisers and our own generative tools produce creative assets at massive scale, the hard problem shifts from making content to understanding it: scoring quality and aesthetics, catching policy and safety violations before they reach a customer, extracting structured meaning from images and video, and measuring whether a creative meets the bar. We work across computer vision, vision-language models, multimodal understanding, content moderation and trust and safety, and evaluation science. The models this team builds run in production as the quality and safety layer across the entire creative lifecycle, from the moment an asset is generated or uploaded through to what advertisers and shoppers ultimately see. We are seeking a science leader to own Creative Understanding end to end. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will directly lead a team of applied scientists while managing and growing team leads and managers as the charter expands across quality assessment, safety and moderation, evaluation and benchmarking, metadata and attribute extraction, brand and logo detection, and content similarity and retrieval. The right leader sets the scientific direction for how we measure and safeguard creative quality at scale, holds the tension between long-term evaluation research and near-term production delivery, and is accountable for the models this team ships. You will be an inventor at heart who is equally comfortable going deep on a vision-language architecture with a scientist and building the team mechanisms, hiring bar, and roadmap that let a growing organization execute. Key job responsibilities This role leads the applied science team responsible for creative quality, safety and moderation, and content understanding across images, video, and multimodal assets. Responsibilities include: * Own the scientific direction for creative quality assessment, content moderation and trust and safety, evaluation and benchmarking, and multimodal content understanding. * Directly lead a team of applied scientists while managing and developing subordinate leads and managers as the portfolio grows across understanding sub-domains. * Drive end-to-end applied science programs with high ambiguity, scale, and complexity, and be accountable for the resulting models in production. * Advance the science of evaluation: define how we measure creative quality, safety, and brand compliance, and build the benchmarks and metrics the broader org relies on. * Research and apply new approaches in computer vision, vision-language models, and multimodal understanding, including quality and aesthetics scoring, safety classification, attribute and metadata extraction, and brand and logo detection. * Recruit, mentor, and grow high-performing applied scientists and science managers, and raise the hiring and technical bar for the team. * Establish team mechanisms for planning, document and design reviews, and cross-functional partnership with product and engineering.
RO, Bucharest
Amazon's Compliance and Safety Services (CoSS) Team is looking for a smart and creative Applied Scientist to apply and extend state-of-the-art research in NLP, multi-modal modeling, domain adaptation, continuous learning and large language model to join the Applied Science team. At Amazon, we are working to be the most customer-centric company on earth. Millions of customers trust us to ensure a safe shopping experience. This is an exciting and challenging position to drive research that will shape new ML solutions for product compliance and safety around the globe in order to achieve best-in-class, company-wide standards around product assurance. You will research on large amounts of tabular, textual, and product image data from product detail pages, selling partner details and customer feedback, evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms and frameworks, and develop new algorithms to improve safety and compliance mechanisms. You will partner with engineers, technical program managers and product managers to design new ML solutions implemented across the entire Amazon product catalog. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist on our team, you will: - Research and Evaluate state-of-the-art algorithms in NLP, multi-modal modeling, domain adaptation, continuous learning and large language model. - Design new algorithms that improve on the state-of-the-art to drive business impact, such as synthetic data generation, active learning, grounding LLMs for business use cases - Design and plan collection of new labels and audit mechanisms to develop better approaches that will further improve product assurance and customer trust. - Analyze and convey results to stakeholders and contribute to the research and product roadmap. - Collaborate with other scientists, engineers, product managers, and business teams to creatively solve problems, measure and estimate risks, and constructively critique peer research - Consult with engineering teams to design data and modeling pipelines which successfully interface with new and existing software - Publish research publications at internal and external venues. About the team The science team delivers custom state-of-the-art algorithms for image and document understanding. The team specializes in developing machine learning solutions to advance compliance capabilities. Their research contributions span multiple domains including multi-modal modeling, unstructured data matching, text extraction from visual documents, and anomaly detection, with findings regularly published in academic venues.
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide end user applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are easy to adopt and easy to use. The Team Join the next science revolution at AWS Life Sciences Applied AI Solutions, where you'll work alongside world-class scientists to build AI that transforms how therapeutics are discovered, developed, and brought to patients. We're out to revolutionize how medicines are discovered, developed, and brought to patients, powered by a new generation of AI. Our team tackles some of the hardest open problems at the intersection of frontier AI and life sciences. We apply biological foundation models, large language models, and agentic reasoning systems to life sciences problems, then put them into the hands of customers as applications and managed services they can fine-tune, tailor, and deploy on their own data. The science challenges are deep: how do you design agentic systems that reason correctly over complex biological, regulatory, and clinical logic? How do you enable customers to tailor foundation models to their proprietary data and get better outputs with less effort? How do you adapt models to reason faithfully in high-stakes scientific and regulatory domains? Today we're focused on two areas. In clinical trials, we're building AI that automates and optimizes regulatory and clinical development workflows. In drug design, our products (including Amazon Bio Discovery) accelerate discovery by giving bench scientists AI-guided protein engineering and antibody design capabilities. We combine frontier research with production-scale delivery to put breakthrough science into the hands of customers solving humanity's hardest problems. We value scientific rigor, encourage publication, and support conference participation. If you want to do research that ships, this is the team. The Role We are seeking an Applied Scientist to build the models and methods behind our life sciences AI products, with a primary focus on clinical trial operations and agentic reasoning. You will design, train, and evaluate systems that reason over complex clinical and operational logic, and ship them into products customers use directly. You will work closely with senior and principal scientists on well-scoped research problems, own your results end to end, and see your work reach production. This role combines expertise in LLM reasoning and agentic AI with applied impact in life sciences. You will work on how large language models reason, plan, and act in complex scientific domains, while applying domain knowledge to ensure models produce scientifically valid outputs. The problems span multiple fronts: - How do you build LLM-based agentic systems that correctly reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and complex multi-step operational workflows? - How do you evaluate agent reliability and faithfulness rigorously enough to trust in high-stakes clinical settings? - How do you develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that let customers get strong results from foundation models on their own data? You will focus on clinical trial operations (agentic automation, structured reasoning, evaluation, domain adaptation), with opportunities to contribute across drug discovery (protein engineering, antibody design) as the portfolio grows. You will own end-to-end scientific solutions from research through production, and your work will directly shape the tools that scientists use daily. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate LLM-based agentic systems that reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and operational workflows - Build rigorous evaluation harnesses and benchmarks to measure agent reliability, faithfulness, and failure modes in high-stakes domains - Develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that help customers get better outputs on their own data with less effort - Contribute to graph-based and causal modeling approaches for clinical trial operations - Partner with Life Sciences domain experts, product, and engineering to translate scientific challenges into shipped capabilities - Own experiments end to end: problem framing, implementation, evaluation, iteration, and hand-off to production - Publish at top-tier venues where the work supports it - Contribute to drug discovery efforts (protein engineering, antibody design) as opportunities arise A day in the life - Design and run an experiment to validate a new agentic reasoning or fine-tuning method, then ship it as a capability customers can use - Diagnose why a model is failing on a new class of inputs and implement a fix to unblock a delivery milestone - Build or extend an evaluation benchmark to measure how faithfully an agent reasons over clinical logic - Meet with domain experts to scope what the next model release needs to do - Review results with a senior scientist, sharpen the approach, and get it over the finish line - Prototype a new idea that could become the next capability in the product About the team AWS Solutions As part of the AWS solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. we blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
US, WA, Seattle
We are Amazon's central Responsible AI team. Our mission is to advance the science and practice of Responsible AI (RAI) to enable Amazon's tens of thousands of builders to build and deploy AI solutions to the high standards that our customers and society expect. As a scientist on this team, you will: - understand in depth the technical and scientific issues related to RAI, including controllability, security, privacy, safety, veracity, robustness, fairness, explainability, transparency, and governance - help define the strategies, priorities and metrics for RAI - solve open problems in RAI to unblock traditional, generative and/or agentic AI use cases and solutions, publishing as appropriate - help develop our team - liase with internal and external stakeholders, including the academic community, on issues related to RAI About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why Amazon Security? At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon’s products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
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Amazon Research Awards

Collaborating with scientists around the world to fund research, share knowledge and encourage innovation.