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ARA Program Rules

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Last updated: March 26, 2025

By applying to or participating in the Amazon Research Awards Program (the “ARA Program”), you (defined below) agree to the following rules (“Rules”). These Rules are solely between Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates (“Amazon”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) and the entity that you represent (“you” or “your”), including the lead researcher/s who applies to the ARA Program (the “Principal Investigator”) and any members of the research team. Capitalized terms not defined herein may be defined in the AWS Agreements (as defined below). You and/or the Principal Investigator are responsible for distributing these Rules to all members of the research team before they participate in any research in connection with a proposal funded by the ARA Program.

I. Eligibility Requirements

To be eligible for an ARA Program award (“Award”), the Principal Investigator must be (1) either a full-time faculty member at an accredited academic institution or a permanent researcher at a non-governmental organization with recognized legal status in its country (equivalent to 501(c)(3) status under the United States Internal Revenue Code) and (2) at or above the age of majority in their jurisdiction of residence at the time of application. Each Principal Investigator is permitted to submit only one proposal to the ARA Program per call for proposal period.

By submitting your proposal to the ARA Program, you represent that your Principal Investigator:

(a) is not a paid employee of a government entity (other than an accredited academic institution);

(b) is not under US export controls or sanctions;

(c) has not been a director, officer, employee, intern or contractor of Amazon within the 12 months preceding submission of your proposal to the ARA Program (“Ineligible Personnel”);

(d) is not a member of the immediate family or household of Ineligible Personnel; and

(e) has not participated in or had decision-making authority over any cloud infrastructure procurements involving Amazon.

The ARA Program is void in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea and the Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine, and where otherwise prohibited by law.

Amazon employees, including employees of Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”), are not eligible to receive an Award.

Amazon is not responsible for your internal organizational policies and procedures that may restrict your (including the Principal Investigator’s) ability to submit a proposal to the ARA Program.

II. Application Content

No proposal to the ARA Program may contain any confidential information and no part may be marked as ‘confidential.’ Amazon does not accept any legal obligation (whether of confidentiality, compensation, return or otherwise) with respect to any proposals. Amazon reserves the right to implement competitive, similar, or identical ideas in the future, without restriction or obligation. You understand and acknowledge that Amazon has wide access to technology, designs, and other materials, and may work on and/or develop projects and ideas that may be competitive with, similar to, or identical to your proposal in theme, idea, format or other respects, inclusive. You acknowledge and agree that you will not be entitled to any compensation as a result of Amazon’s use of any such similar or identical material that has or may come to Amazon from other sources.

You represent and warrant that your proposal:

(a) is either your original work or an update to your original work;

(b) does not, to your knowledge, infringe any third-party patent rights; and

(c) does not, to your knowledge, infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate any other third-party intellectual property rights (i.e., other than patent rights), including any copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, contract or licensing rights, rights of publicity or privacy, or moral rights.

III. Awards

Proposals selected for funding will receive an Award that may include cash, Promotional Credit (as defined in the AWS Promotional Credit Terms & Conditions), or both. Award funding is not extendable or transferable without our written consent, but you may submit new proposals for subsequent ARA Program calls.

All Award amounts will be determined by Amazon in its sole discretion. Any cash component of an Award:

(a) will be structured as a one-time unrestricted gift to your Principal Investigator’s academic institution or organization;

(b) will be provided directly to your academic institution or organization for distribution and management; and

(c) may not be used for indirect expenses which are not allocable, reasonable, adequately documented, and consistent with established policies and practices of your academic institution or organization.

You are responsible for the administration and apportionment of any costs and expenses associated with an Award, including any allowable and allocable overhead or indirect costs. In order to process any cash Award, you will be required to complete administrative requirements, which may include submitting a W-9 form to us, completing a tax questionnaire, and registering in Amazon’s Payee Central System. If you do not fulfill the administrative requirements for processing cash Awards within two years of your receipt of an Award notification, Amazon reserves the right to withhold payment. Any payment from Amazon to you under the Award may be issued by a purchase order. Except where prohibited by law, you are responsible for all taxes (including income tax and value added tax) that may be imposed on you by relevant local tax authorities.

These Rules, the agreements referenced herein, and any other agreement regarding the relationship between you and Amazon will constitute a Master Agreement under the terms of the purchase order.

IV. AWS Customer Agreement and AWS Promotional Credit Terms & Conditions

Amazon may make available to you an amount of AWS promotional computing credits (“AWS Credits”) for use in support of this Agreement. AWS Credits provided to University under this Agreement are subject to the AWS Promotional Credit Terms and Conditions (as may be updated from time to time on the AWS website). You acknowledge and agree that any use of AWS services, including but not limited to use of AWS Credits, is subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the AWS Customer Agreement (https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/), and/or any separate, bespoke agreement that you have entered into with Amazon governing use of AWS services (collectively, the “AWS Agreements”). In the event of any conflict between this Agreement and the AWS Agreements, the terms of the AWS Agreements shall take precedence.

V. Privacy

You acknowledge and agree that we may collect, store, share, and otherwise use personally identifiable information provided during the ARA Program application process, including but not limited to, name, mailing address, phone number, and email address. All personally identifiable information collected is subject to, and will be used in accordance with, the Amazon Privacy Notice, including for administering the ARA Program and verifying applicants’ identities, addresses, and telephone numbers in the event a proposal is selected for funding. By participating in the ARA Program, you consent to the transfer of personal data to the United States for purposes of administering the ARA Program, conducting publicity about the ARA Program, and additional purposes that are consistent with goals relating to the ARA Program. The data controller for information collected by us is Amazon.com, Inc., 410 Terry Ave North, Seattle, Washington 98109, USA.

VI. Publicity

Except where prohibited, you consent to our use of your name and the Principal Investigator’s name and title, proposal title, and proposal abstract text for purposes of identifying Amazon’s support of you, the Principal Investigator, the proposal and/or the ARA Program.

You may acknowledge our support by stating that your research is supported by the ARA Program (e.g., “Research reported in this [publication/press release] was supported by an Amazon Research Award, [Cycle /Year].”). Any use of Amazon or AWS logos is subject to the Amazon Trademark Guidelines and AWS Trademark Guidelines, respectively. Any other use of Amazon or AWS logos requires Amazon’s or such affiliate’s prior written consent. You must receive Amazon’s prior written consent before issuing a press release or making any public disclosure regarding your participation in the ARA Program. You agree not to misrepresent or embellish the relationship between us and you. You will not imply any relationship or affiliation between us and you except as expressly permitted by these Rules.

VII. Limitation of Liability

TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, YOU ACCEPT THE CONDITIONS STATED IN THESE RULES, AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE DECISIONS OF AMAZON, AND WARRANT THAT YOU ARE ELIGIBLE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE ARA PROGRAM. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, YOU, EACH RESEARCH TEAM MEMBER, THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR AND THE PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR’S INSTITUTION HEREBY RELEASES AMAZON FROM, AND WAIVES ANY AND ALL CLAIMS AGAINST AMAZON FOR, ANY LOSSES, LIABILITY, AND DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, (INCLUDING FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, LOST PROFITS, COST OF COVER OR OTHER SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, INDIRECT, PUNITIVE, EXEMPLARY OR RELIANCE DAMAGES) INCURRED OR SUSTAINED IN CONNECTION WITH OR ARISING OUT OF (1) THE ARA PROGRAM OR ANY TRAVEL OR ACTIVITY RELATED THERETO, (2) USE OF ANY PROPOSAL OR RIGHTS THEREIN, OR (3) ANY BREACH OF ANY AGREEMENT OR WARRANTY ASSOCIATED WITH THE ARA PROGRAM, INCLUDING THESE RULES, HOWEVER CAUSED AND REGARDLESS OF THEORY OF LIABILITY.

VIII. Changes

We may amend any of these Rules at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the ARA Program website. Your continued participation in the ARA Program after the effective date of the revised Rules constitutes your acceptance of the rules.

IX. Disputes

Any dispute or claim relating in any way to the ARA Program will be resolved in accordance with terms set forth in the AWS Agreements.

X. Representations and Warranties

You represent and warrant that:

(a) your receipt of any Award is neither prohibited by nor inconsistent with any applicable laws, regulations, or binding orders, including applicable ethics rules or internal institutional rules;

(b) you have completed or will complete all legal and ethical requirements necessary to accept the Award;

(c) your receipt of the Award will not knowingly create a conflict of interest for Amazon;

(d) the Principal Investigator has not participated in, nor had, and do not anticipate participating in or having, any decision-making authority over, any procurements or purchasing decisions involving Amazon on behalf of your organization during the previous or upcoming twelve (12) months; and

(e) you will properly book and record the Award in your accounting documents in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

In the event that your representations and warranties under this section are or become inaccurate, you must notify us immediately (research-awards@amazon.com) and any Award your organization receives will be voidable.

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Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist III on this team, you will: - Drive end-to-end Machine Learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, complexity. - Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous data sets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in deploying your ML models. - Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Research new and innovative machine learning approaches.
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Applied Scientist I, SPB Advertiser Guidance
US, WA, Seattle
We are looking for a passionate Applied Scientist to contribute to the next generation of agentic AI applications for Amazon advertisers. In this role, you will support the development of agentic architectures, help build tools and datasets, and contribute to systems that can reason, plan, and act autonomously across complex advertiser workflows. You will work alongside senior scientists at the forefront of applied AI, gaining hands-on experience with methods for fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and preference optimization, while contributing to evaluation frameworks that ensure safety, reliability, and trust at scale. You will work backwards from the needs of advertisers—contributing to customer-facing products that directly help them create, optimize, and grow their campaigns. Beyond building models, you will support the agent ecosystem by experimenting with and applying core primitives such as tool orchestration, multi-step reasoning, and adaptive preference-driven behavior. This role involves tackling well-scoped technical problems, while collaborating with engineers and product managers to bring solutions into production. Key Job Responsibilities - Contribute to building agents that guide advertisers in conversational and non-conversational experiences. - Implement model and agent optimization techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, instruction tuning, and preference optimization (e.g., DPO/IPO) under guidance from senior scientists. - Support dataset curation and tool development for MCP. - Contribute to evaluation pipelines for agent workflows, including automated benchmarks, multi-step reasoning tests, and safety guardrails. - Implement and iterate on agentic architectures (e.g., CoT, ToT, ReAct) that integrate planning, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning. - Support prototyping of multi-agent orchestration frameworks and workflows. - Collaborate with peers across engineering, science, and product to bring scientific innovations into production. - Stay current with the latest research in LLMs, RL, and agent-based AI, and apply findings to practical problems. About the team The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. The Advertiser Guidance team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting 1.6MM advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in guidance systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem. Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware agentic advertiser guidance system that leverages LLMs together with tools such as auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This agentic framework, will operate across both chat and non-chat experiences in the ad console, scaling to natural language queries as well as proactively delivering guidance based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular keyword recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning, MCP, and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.
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