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AWS AI: Human-in-the-loop machine learning and annotation call for proposals — Spring 2022

Sharing learnings and ML capabilities as fully managed services, and putting them into the hands of every scientist and developer.

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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 on AWS, including AWS AI Services, AWS ML Services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, Amazon SageMaker Neo, and Amazon Augmented AI), and Apache MXNet on AWS.

AWS AI is soliciting funding proposals related to Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning and Annotation. We specifically aim to solicit funding proposals that focus on innovation related to supporting annotators with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Proposals should be attached to one (or more) of the following themes:

  1. Tools and Techniques for Instructional Clarity and Accelerated Onboarding in Annotation Tasks.
  2. Interactive Tools and Techniques for Real-Time AI-Assisted Annotation.
  3. ML models for auto-labeling in low data regime that work across tasks and modalities, e.g. vision and language.
  4. 3D deep learning for autonomous driving for auto-labeling and data selection.

Timeline

  • Submission period: June 3 — July 15, 2022
  • Decision letters will be sent out December 2022

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $50,000 USD on average
  • AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average
  • 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

PIs are encouraged to exemplify how their proposed techniques or research studies will apply to tasks related to human-in-the-loop machine learning and data annotation. 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. Proposals for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 4 pages, not including Appendices.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the creativity and quality of the scientific content, and potential impact to the research community and society at large.

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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Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. The Amazon Music Search Science team is looking for an execution-focused Senior Applied Scientist to spearhead core scientific initiatives within our Bangalore hub. In this leadership-by-example role, you will define and execute the applied science roadmap for search and content discovery systems, directly impacting millions of customers worldwide. You will operate at the exciting intersection of large-scale search infrastructure, applied machine learning, and foundation models. You will drive immediate, high-impact business deliverables in music search relevance, personalization, and retrieval performance, while simultaneously architecting the long-term technological vision that expands our search ecosystem toward deeper semantic intelligence, agentic workflows, and cross-domain audio understanding. Key job responsibilities - Strategic Roadmap & Architecture: Define and execute the technical and scientific roadmap for music search systems, making critical architectural decisions that balance short-term feature delivery with long-term scalability, maintainability, and extensibility. - Pioneering Applied Science: Lead the design and implementation of state-of-the-art machine learning solutions leveraging deep learning, LLMs, and agentic workflows to solve complex search, ranking, and intent-matching challenges. - Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner closely with product management, engineering leaders, and peer teams to harmonize technical direction and deliver synchronized customer experiences. - Technical Excellence & Mentorship: Drive engineering and scientific excellence across the team by conducting rigorous design reviews, establishing modeling best practices, setting high bars for artifact delivery, and mentoring junior/mid-level scientists. - Experimentation & Scaling: Establish robust scientific processes for large-scale data analysis, offline model validation, and online A/B experimentation, ensuring high statistical rigor and measurable business impact across millions of active listeners. - Stakeholder Influence & Writing: Author strategic whitepapers, and executive-level documentation. Communicate complex technical options and trade-offs to senior leadership to drive informed decision-making. Basic Qualifications - PhD, or Master’s degree and 6+ years of applied research and industrial machine learning experience in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field. - 3+ years of specialized experience designing, building, and scaling machine learning models for core production business applications (e.g., Search, Recommendation Systems, or Large-Scale Information Retrieval). - Expert programming proficiency in Python, Java, C++, or related languages, combined with deep familiarity with neural network architectures and deep learning frameworks. - Proven track record of owning end-to-end technical deliverables from problem formulation and model architecture to production deployment and performance tuning. - Demonstrated leadership in mentoring technical talent and driving engineering/scientific best practices. Preferred Qualifications - Deep expertise in search retrieval, query understanding, ranking algorithms, and large-scale vector search/embedding systems. - Experience building applied science solutions on top of foundation models, large language models (LLMs), or multi-modal architectures. - Experience with large-scale distributed training and inference optimization on cloud infrastructure (AWS). - A strong publication record or patent portfolio in top-tier peer-reviewed venues (e.g., NeurIPS, SIGIR, KDD, ACL, ICML). - Experience designing and interpreting complex online experimentation frameworks for consumer-facing recommendation or search products.
Principal Applied Scientist, CX Science
US, CA, Santa Clara
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Senior Applied Scientist, Safe Locomotion, Compass
US, CA, Pasadena
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join Amazon Robotics, Compass Team. In this role, you will own the development of safe legged locomotion algorithms and their deployment on physical hardware, developing learning-based controllers that enable quadrupeds and humanoids to walk, run, and recover from disturbances with agility and robustness. You will leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL), sim-to-real transfer, and other learning-based architectures to train policies that produce stable, dynamic gaits across varied terrains and operating conditions. These learned policies will interface with model-based control strategies to form whole-body control laws that balance performance and safety. Your work sits at the novel intersection of safety and machine learning, where these learned policies will be used in a safety-critical context for complex safety constraints like stability. You will collaborate closely with perception, planning, and safety teams to close the loop between what the robot sees, where it needs to go, and how it moves to get there safely. This is a rare opportunity to shape how legged robots move through the world alongside people. Key job responsibilities • Design, train, and deploy reinforcement learning policies for dynamic legged locomotion including walking, running, stair climbing, and fall recovery on physical quadruped and humanoid platforms • Collaborate with the Compass safety team to ensure locomotion policies operate within safety-critical bounds, incorporating control barrier functions or other formal safety mechanisms as constraints during or after training • Develop sim-to-real transfer pipelines that produce policies robust to the reality gap, including domain randomization, system identification, and adaptive strategies • Integrate learned locomotion policies with model-based whole-body controllers, defining how RL outputs (e.g., joint targets, contact schedules) interface with optimization-based control layers • Formulate reward functions and training curricula that encode both performance objectives and safety constraints, ensuring policies respect stability and contact-force limits • Develop and maintain large-scale training infrastructure for locomotion policy learning, including physics simulation environments and parallelized training pipelines • Evaluate policy performance rigorously through simulation benchmarks, hardware experiments, and failure-mode analysis • Investigate emerging techniques (e.g., foundation models for control, diffusion policies, world models) and assess their applicability to safe legged locomotion • Publish research at top-tier robotics and ML venues and contribute to Amazon's scientific reputation in legged robotics • Collaborate with perception and planning teams to enable terrain-aware and goal-conditioned locomotion behaviors 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 Work with the inventors of control barrier functions on a novel, universal approach to safe autonomy: one that scales across mobile robots, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and future robot platforms with dynamic stability. You'll push the boundary of safe performance by integrating safety with motion planning, RL, and foundation models, ensuring that safety is never a blocker to robot performance. Your work will underpin robots operating alongside people at Amazon's unprecendented scale.
PNT Estimation and Algorithms Engineer, Flight Dynamics Research
US, WA, Redmond
As a member of a growing PNT team within Amazon Leo, the PNT Estimation and Algorithms Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, optimizing and monitoring high-precision estimation architectures across terrestrial and space-based networks. You will develop and validate orbit determination, filtering, and sensor fusion algorithms to achieve high precision positioning and timing accuracy using RF and optical inter-satellite link measurements. 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 Design, implement, and validate orbit determination (OD) and clock estimation algorithms, including Extended Kalman Filters (EKF), Barch Least Square, Square-Root/Sigma-Point Kalman Filters (SKF), and Factor Graph Optimization (FGO) approaches Develop inter-satellite link (ISL) navigation and time-transfer measurement models, including range and range-rate Evaluate and integrate emerging estimation techniques (batch/sequential estimation, robust filtering, multi-sensor fusion) to improve positioning and timing accuracy Design and build simulation and analysis frameworks (e.g., Monte Carlo CONOPS studies) to characterize filter performance, covariance realism, and convergence behavior Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure estimator outputs meet mission-level accuracy requirements Conduct performance analysis and troubleshooting of estimation algorithms across distributed constellation and ground infrastructure
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.
Data Scientist, NA Operations
US, WA, Bellevue
Within Amazon's North American Operations, we are tackling mission-critical problems to optimize network operations. We build complex causal, forecasting, and optimization models to better understand, predict, and govern processes across hundreds of warehouses. We are seeking a Data Scientist to drive the development of these models, deeply integrate with business stakeholders, and leverage generative AI to more intelligently build for our customers. Key job responsibilities - Interfacing with stakeholders to understand business problems and translating these into high and low-level design documents. - Building machine learning, optimization, and causal inference models that target business-specific challenges. - Sourcing, cleaning, and analyzing large and complex data sets associated with warehouse operations to provide business-critical insights at scale. - Leveraging AI-based solutions to drive development and provide nuanced insights into model outcomes. A day in the life You will be a single-threaded owner of projects within Amazon Operations, owning project scoping, stakeholder engagement, data enablement, and model development. Your work will be directly consumed by partner teams throughout Operations and Finance, and hence a strong sense of ownership is required to educate both technical and non-technical stakeholders on developed science solutions. About the team Our team is comprised of Data Scientists, Applied Scientists, and Economists, and are trusted to make data-driven solutions that power operations decision making. We strive to build consensus on divisive topics through clear presentation of problem statements paired with deep analyses that gain visibility throughout all levels of the organization from operators to executives.
Principal Applied Scientist, Prime Video Personalization & Discovery , PV Personalization & Discovery, Principal Applied Scientist, PVPD
US, WA, Seattle
As a Principal Applied Scientist at Prime Video, you will be a technical and strategic leader responsible for inventing, developing, and deploying groundbreaking AI solutions that power personalized, relevant, and delightful experiences for millions of global customers. You will help shape the vision and direction of key ML systems that support Prime Video’s mission to deliver AI-powered customer experiences. This role demands a unique blend of deep technical expertise in machine learning and recommendation systems, industry leadership, and strong collaboration skills. You will guide the development of high-impact systems end-to-end - leading innovation from foundational research through production deployment - while mentoring scientists and influencing product and engineering roadmaps. We are looking for a thought leader who brings a strong track record of delivering ML innovations at scale, along with the curiosity and drive to push boundaries. This is a rare opportunity to drive meaningful impact at one of the largest streaming services in the world. Key job responsibilities - Invent, prototype, and productionize large-scale AI solutions across Prime Video’s personalization and discovery ecosystem using deep learning, generative AI, reinforcement learning, and optimization techniques; - Provide technical leadership and influence product vision by collaborating closely with engineers, product managers, and senior stakeholders; - Design and lead high-impact A/B tests and data analyses to validate hypotheses and guide product direction; - Drive technical bar-raising across science and engineering teams through mentorship, design reviews, and collaboration; - Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging research; leverage them to evolve long-term strategy and architecture; - Publish impactful research internally and externally (e.g. top-tier conferences and journals).
Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Generative AI (Video)
US, CA, Sunnyvale
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! Prime Video is pioneering the use of Generative AI to empower the next generation of creatives. Our mission is to make world-class media creation accessible, scalable and efficient. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to advance the state of the art in Generative AI and to deliver these innovations as production-ready systems at Amazon scale. Your work will give creators unprecedented freedom and control while driving new efficiencies. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will have end-to-end ownership of the product, related research and experimentation. In addition, you will be applying advanced machine learning techniques in Computer Vision, Multimedia Understanding and Generative AI. We're building the foundational technology stack, spanning diffusion and flow-matching models, 3D/4D scene and character generation, motion and camera control, and post-training alignment. Other responsibilities include: - Research and develop generative models for controllable synthesis across images, video, vector graphics, and multimedia - Innovate in advanced diffusion and flow-based methods (e.g., inverse flow matching, parameter efficient training, guided sampling, test-time adaptation) to improve efficiency, controllability, and scalability - Advance visual grounding, depth and 3D estimation, segmentation, and matting for integration into pre-visualization, compositing, VFX, and post-production pipelines - Design multimodal GenAI workflows including visual-language model tooling, structured prompt orchestration, agentic pipelines
Applied Scientist II, Search Ranking, Search Ranking
US, CA, Palo Alto
The Amazon Search team creates customer-focused search solutions and technologies. Whenever a customer visits an Amazon site worldwide and types in a query or browses through product categories, Amazon Product Search services go to work. We design, develop, and deploy high-performance distributed search systems that rank a catalog of billions of products for hundreds of millions of shoppers. The Search Relevance team owns the ranking models that decide the order of results on every Amazon search page. In this role, you will design and post-train deep ranking models, including LLM-based rankers and multi-tower deep learning models, that jointly optimize purchase, relevance, and personalization. You will invent modeling and training techniques that push the Pareto frontier across multiple objectives, and take your work end to end from novel research prototype through offline evaluation to production online experimentation. Personalization is a first-class objective on this team. You will build models that reason over each customer's history, durable preferences, and query intent to decide which results best fit that specific customer, rather than optimizing a single population-level ranking. We treat search as an active research frontier and invest heavily in staying at the leading edge of ML. Beyond today's ranking stack, our current explorations include LLM agents that reason and plan across multi-step workflows, tool-augmented foundation models, and new paradigms that combine retrieval, reasoning, and personalization. You will help chart where search goes next, and see your ideas ship to real customers within weeks, not quarters. You will work in a dynamic, entrepreneurial team while leveraging the resources of Amazon.com, one of the world's leading technology companies. Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information. Key job responsibilities Your responsibilities include but are not limited to: - Design, train, and deploy state-of-the-art ranking models that decide how results are ordered on Amazon search, spanning LLM-based rankers and multi-tower deep learning architectures that jointly model engagement, relevance, and personalization. - Post-train LLMs and ranking models with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning (e.g. GRPO, DPO, RLHF), knowledge distillation, and listwise ranking losses (e.g. LambdaLoss, ListNet, ListMLE). - Compose multiple objectives (engagement, relevance, personalization) into a single ranking through principled multi-objective optimization at inference. - Design large-scale label pipelines, including LLM-as-teacher supervision, that turn customer signals and expert judgment into training and reward signals. - Optimize inference for production ranking models through quantization, quantization-aware training, teacher-student distillation, and serving-stack tuning. - Evaluate proposed solutions through offline benchmarks and online A/B tests, and drive the analysis that decides whether a change ships. - Publish and present your work at internal and external scientific venues in ML, NLP, and IR.
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