Tur discusses his experience from his early days working on DARPA programs, how he’s seen the field of conversational AI evolve, and more about the machine learning technologies that provide teachable moments for Alexa.

Conversational AI / Natural-language processing

Alexa & Friends features Gokhan Tur, Alexa AI senior principal scientist

Hear Tur discuss his experience from his work on DARPA programs, how he’s seen the field of conversational AI evolve, and more.

By Staff writer

September 28, 2020

Amazon recently unveiled a host of new devices and AI services, including the ability for Alexa customers to directly teach Alexa. Among other things, this service helps Alexa "learn new concepts on the fly" by having her ask questions to fill gaps in her understanding—similar to what we do as humans.

On October 1, Jeff Blankenburg and Gokhan Tur met for a live interview to discuss Tur’s experience from his early days working on DARPA programs, how he’s seen the field of conversational AI evolve, and more about the machine learning technologies that provide teachable moments for Alexa.

Tur has spent the past 20 years within the industry exploring the field of human/machine conversational language understanding systems. He has helped research and develop some of today’s leading voice technology systems across a diverse set of companies, and today leads research efforts related to helping Alexa become more conversational, natural, context-aware, knowledgeable, and self-learning.

About the Author

Staff writer

Principal Applied Scientist, AWS AI Research and Education

US, CA, Santa Clara

Job summaryAWS AI/ML is looking for world class scientists to join its AI Research and Education group, which brings science and science-related engineering work to Amazon’s cloud-based AI services, open source libraries, and education projects. In this role, you will work with your peers and senior management to set direction for Amazon’s AI efforts. Our mission is to put the power of AI in the hands of every developer. You will lead our efforts in AutoML, including both the research side and the open source library, AutoGluon. You will be responsible for mentoring a team of applied scientists and develop top talent. You will partner with engineering leaders to deliver remarkable new AWS services and features that leverage Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and AutoML.As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will identify science problems, create roadmaps for forward-looking research, communicate them to senior leadership, and work closely with engineering teams to bring research to production. You will work with teams of talented scientists and fill the ranks by attracting the best scientists in machine learning. You will work with talented peers and leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources.Key job responsibilities· Map business requirements and customer needs to a scientific problem.· Align the research direction to business requirements and make the right call on research/development schedule and prioritization.· Research, design and supervise the implementation of scalable machine learning (ML) models for AutoML, and/or other scalable computational models to solve problems that matter to our customers in an iterative fashion.· Mentor and develop junior applied scientists and developers who work on data science problems in the same organization.· Stay informed on the latest machine learning, deep learning, and/or artificial intelligence trends and make presentations to the larger engineering and applied science communities.About the teamInclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded professional and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.

Applied Scientist

US, WA, Bellevue

Job summaryAmazon Flex is re-imagining what it means to work, and we need your help. We're in search of an applied scientist to help us solve machine learning problems around classification, language understanding and business optimization.Flex (flex.amazon.com) is a gig economy program that lets anyone become their own boss (a "delivery partner") and set their own schedule, by delivering packages to Amazon customers. The Flex app coordinates delivery partners' work with Amazon's cutting-edge logistics technologies. It's the home to every feature a delivery partner would need: on-boarding, delivery scheduling, routing and navigation, tracking their earnings, and more. Delivery partners are a key ingredient in ensuring a great experience for Amazon's customers, and we're building features to engage with our partners like never before.Do you enjoy...· Directly impacting how customers experience your products?· Leading a major change in how people are recognized for their work?· Working alongside creative, fun and motivated teammates?· Solving complex problems at massive scale?· Anticipating the next big problem to solve?Then join the team.

Applied Scientist Graph Query Planning and Optimization, Amazon Neptune

US, WA, Seattle

Do you have experience in Query Optimization? Ever thought about how much more fun this will be with a graph database system, where query languages are still evolving fast? Come join our creative team of engineers dedicated to making Amazon Neptune ever faster and better!In this position, you will work on building database systems specifically catered to support graph databases. Apply your research and software engineering skills to build and apply new techniques towards graph query planning, optimization and execution. Your work will directly impact the performance of the queries that our customers run on Neptune. Work with and learn from experts in the field of databases, graph technologies and semantic web. Gain the exposure to learn about other related AWS services.Amazon Neptune is a fast, scalable, fully-managed graph database service, already used by thousands of customers around the globe. Neptune powers graph use cases such as recommendation engines, fraud prevention, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and many more. We are constantly improving query performance and adding new features to make all these use cases run increasingly better and to create more impact for our customers.The core of Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine capable of storing hundreds of billions of relationships and querying with milliseconds latency. Neptune supports both the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and property graph data models and their respective query languages.To learn more about Amazon Neptune visit: https://aws.amazon.com/neptune/Inclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.

Senior Economist, Ads Science & Analysis Team

US, CA, Santa Monica

Job summaryAmazon Advertising seeks an Economist to help develop an automated financial forecasting system for our DSP advertising business, and help model key relationships that drive advertiser value and impact our financial performance. We are looking for a motivated candidate who has operated successfully in a fast-paced, global, results-oriented environment and has the ability to influence the decisions of senior business leaders through effective verbal and written communication, logical reasoning, and the presentation of analyses. The successful candidate will collaborate closely with business teams to help execute and shape our product and financial strategy.If you enjoy using Econometric methods to shape strategy and build new initiatives from concept to full-scale operations this will be a good match. We are looking for a highly motivated individual to develop deep industry understanding, create new models gaining insight into advertising performance, analyze monetization strategies to maximize revenue, and provide guidance for feature roadmap prioritization and decision-making. This position will collaborate with business leaders on a daily basis and will be contributing to overall financial modeling and analysis during our operating cycle plans, periodic forecast updates, requirements planning, business reviews, and providing business insights into key initiatives.The successful candidate will be a self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity; dives deep into data to find key relationships, creates models to better understand and forecast processes, is detail oriented and has the ability to work well with cross-functional teams including product development, science, sales, other finance teams, and senior leaders.About the teamThis role is open to the following locations: Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington DC/Arlington, VA.

Applied Scientist - Amazon S3 (AWS)

DE, BE, Berlin

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is storage for the Internet. Through the use of pioneering techniques in storage & computing, customers can reliably store their data on Amazon’s proven computing infrastructure to achieve virtually limitless storage capacity at minimal cost. Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that enables customers to store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere in the world. We build and run the largest commercial storage system in the world with trillions of objects and regularly serving millions of requests per second.We’re looking for an Applied Scientist to join the team in Berlin, Germany to help us build a next generation product. The ideal candidate is excited about the incredible opportunity that cloud computing represents, and is passionate about delivering quality services in a hyper-growth environment where priorities can shift fast. You’ll make our customers’ lives better through the features and service improvements that you own and deliver, and will work with other leaders in the team to guide both the success of the Berlin office and S3 as a whole. As part of our team, you’ll be able to bring innovation and execute on new ideas that will raise the bar on what our customers can achieve with S3. You will be working with customers to design and build the technology that powers applications that you love like Airbnb, Netflix, Uber, and many more.If this sounds like you, come join us and help AWS continue to write the cloud computing story for the industry.Work-life Balance - Our team works together to provide work/life balance for all team members. We recognise that the circumstances of our team members vary, and we balance work across the team so we’re all able to maintain standards on behalf of our customers, while at the same time allowing for rich and happy personal lives.Mentorship & Career Growth - We have a formal mentor search application that lets you find a mentor that works best for you based on location, job family, job level, etc. We can also help you find a mentor or two, because two is better than one. In addition to formal mentors, we work and train together so we are always learning from one another, and we celebrate and support the career progression of our team members.Inclusive Team Culture - We have a diverse team and drive towards an inclusive culture and work environment. Our team is intentional about attracting, developing, and retaining amazing talent from diverse backgrounds. Our team members are active in Amazon’s 10+ affinity groups, sometimes known as employee resource groups, which bring employees together across businesses and locations around the world. These range from groups such as the Black Employee Network, Amazon Women and Engineering, and LGBTQ+Ownership is central to everything we deliver at Amazon. You will own the entire lifecycle of your work from design to implementation, testing, and operations. We strive to build a collaborative work environment that lets you both broaden your impact and grow with the support of mentors and senior engineers on the team.Creating a reliable, scalable, and flexible web service requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of Computer Science and practical experience building large-scale distributed systems. You should be somebody who enjoys working on solving complex problems, is customer-centric, and feels strongly not only about applied science to innovate on behalf of our customers. Join us and help solve a challenging set of problems in a space packed full of opportunities.Key responsibilities include:· Researching, designing and developing innovative solutions to complex problems in storage systems such as S3· Defining and executing on a research roadmap for S3. You’ll know and talk with your stakeholders on a regular basis, as well as using data and metrics to understand how your service is used, and build and deliver on a roadmap that delights our customers.· Having fun working on ground breaking technology with people just as passionate about their work as you!We at AWS value individual expression, respect different opinions, and work together to create a culture where each of us is able to contribute fully. Our unique backgrounds and perspectives strengthen our ability to achieve Amazon's mission of being Earth's most customer-centric company.The Berlin S3 team is fun, ambitious, growing, and a great place to be able to have impact. If you’re a passionate software engineering leader excited about solving difficult problems at the challenging scale of AWS, we’d love to hear from you.A day in the lifeAbout the hiring groupJob responsibilities

Applied Scientist, Amazon Detective

US, MA, Boston

Job summaryAmazon Detective team is looking for a scientist with a strong background in machine learning and distributed computing to join our group that spearheads the development of next-generation graph-based analytics and AI systems for security investigations.Amazon Detective is one of the AWS External Security Services. Amazon Detective makes it easy to analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities.We are a team of scientists with varied research backgrounds and experience who worked on problems ranging from discovery of gravitational waves, to quantum computing, to robotics and more. We embrace diversity of thoughts and encourage original ideas. We emphasize collaborative work culture and support professional growth. Our team is tackling some of the most challenging problems at the intersection of cyber-security, big data, and machine learning. If you are motivated to work on advancing technology and making a positive societal impact at the unprecedented scale, then this is the team for you.The AWS External Security Services team builds technologies that help customers strengthen their security posture and better meet security requirements in the AWS Cloud. Our scientists work hands-on in close collaboration with security technicians, engineers, and product managers. We are customer-obsessed, and focus on research that brings value to our customers.Key Responsibilities:· Design, prototype, and validate graph models for security data, using both quantitative and business judgment· Develop new data-analysis algorithms and tools· Collaborate with software engineering teams to integrate successful experiments into large-scale, highly complex production services.· Report results in a scientifically rigorous way· Collaborate with security engineers and other scientists at Amazon on the state-of-the-art research projectsHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and we host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.About UsInclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.

Research Scientist - AI Planning and Scheduling

US, MA, North Reading

The Research and Advanced Development team at Amazon Robotics is seeking innovative hands-on scientists to work on cutting edge algorithms to power automation in Amazon’s order fulfillment and transportation network. Our multi-disciplinary team includes scientists with backgrounds in AI planning and scheduling, robotic grasping and manipulation, machine learning, and operations research. We work on problems such as:- Dynamic allocation and scheduling of tasks to thousands of robots- Learning how to manipulate all the products that Amazon sells- Planning and coordinating the paths of thousands of robots- Co-design of robotic logistics processes and the algorithms to optimize themThe ideal candidate for this position will be familiar with planning or learning algorithms at both the theoretical and implementation levels. You will have the chance to solve complex scientific problems and see your solutions come to life in Amazon’s warehouses!Inclusive Team CultureHere at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have 12 affinity groups (employee resource groups) with more than 87,000 employees across hundreds of chapters around the world. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which reminds team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust.FlexibilityIt isn’t about which hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We offer flexibility and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthWe care about your career growth too. Whether your goals are to explore new technologies, take on bigger opportunities, or get to the next level, we'll help you get there. Our business is growing fast and our people will grow with it.

Applied Scientist, Private Brands Intelligence

US, CA, San Diego

The Amazon Private Brands Intelligence team applies Machine Learning, Causal Inference, and Econometrics/Economics to derive actionable insights about the complex economy of Amazon’s retail business. We develop statistical models and algorithms to drive strategic business decisions and improve operations. We are an interdisciplinary team of Economists, Scientists, and Engineers building Day One solutions using cutting-edge technology to solve some of the toughest business problems for Amazon Private Brands (APB).You will work with business leaders, scientists, economists, and engineers to translate business and functional requirements into concrete deliverables, including the design, development, testing, and deployment of highly scalable ML models. You will invent and implement scalable ML, RL, and econometric models while also building tools to help our customers gain and apply insights. This is a unique, high visibility opportunity for someone who wants to have business impact, dive deep into large-scale economic problems, enable measurable actions on the Consumer economy, and work closely with scientists, economists, and engineers. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience building predictive models and working with distributed systems.As an Applied Scientist, you bring business and industry context to science and technology decisions. You set the standard for scientific excellence and make decisions that affect the way we build and integrate algorithms. Your solutions are exemplary in terms of algorithm design, clarity, model structure, efficiency, and extensibility. You tackle intrinsically hard problems, acquiring expertise as needed. You decompose complex problems into straightforward solutions.To learn more about Amazon science, please visit https://www.amazon.scienceAmazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us

Data Scientist, Shopper Experience

US, NY, New York

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our businesses driving long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. As a core product offering within our advertising portfolio, Sponsored Products (SP) helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The SP team's 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!As a Data Scientist on this team, you will:· Solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, diving deep to identify business insights and opportunities, design simulations and experiments, developing statistical and ML models by tailoring to business needs, and collaborating with Scientists, Engineers, BIE's, and Product Managers.· Write code (Python, R, Scala, SQL, etc.) to obtain, manipulate, and analyze data· Apply statistical and machine learning knowledge to specific business problems and data.· Build decision-making models and propose solution for the business problem you define.· Retrieve, synthesize, and present critical data in a format that is immediately useful to answering specific questions or improving system performance.· Analyze historical data to identify trends and support optimal decision making.· Formalize assumptions about how our systems are expected to work, create statistical definition of the outlier, and develop methods to systematically identify outliers. Work out why such examples are outliers and define if any actions needed.· Given anecdotes about anomalies or generate automatic scripts to define anomalies, deep dive to explain why they happen, and identify fixes.· Conduct written and verbal presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication.Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.Impact and Career Growth: You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE

Applied Scientist

US, CA, San Diego

Job summaryAmazon Science gives you insight into the company’s approach to customer focused scientific innovation. Amazon fundamentally believes that scientific innovation is essential to being the most customer-centric company in the world. It’s the company’s ability to have an impact at scale that allows us to attract some of the brightest minds in artificial intelligence and related fields. Our scientists continue to publish, teach, and engage with the academic community, in addition to utilizing our working backwards method to enrich the way we live and work.Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information.Do you want to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to help Amazon provide the best customer experience by preventing eCommerce fraud?Do you want to build advanced algorithmic systems that help manage safety of millions of transactions every day?Are you excited by the prospect of analyzing and modeling terabytes of data and creating state-of-the-art algorithms 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 enjoy collaborating in a diverse team environment?If yes, then you may be a great fit to join the Amazon Buyer Risk Prevention Machine Learning group.Major responsibilities· Use statistical and machine learning techniques to create scalable risk management systems· Learning and understanding large amounts of Amazon’s historical business data for specific instances of risk or broader risk trends· Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative models for risk management· Working closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations· Working closely with operations staff to optimize risk management operations,· Establishing scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation· Tracking general business activity and providing clear, compelling management reporting on a regular basis· Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches

Applied Scientist

US, VA, Arlington

Job summaryThe AWS Infrastructure Planning group is responsible for planning and coordinating a complex, multi-tier supply chain that delivers capacity for all AWS services. This includes data center setup, equipment purchase, installation and operation of servers with power and cooling, inventory management and other such decisions. We're building a new suite of tools to automate all AWS supply chain planning, with a broad charter that involves inventory optimization, placement, vendor allocation, transition management, lead time predictions, and more. We are responsible for ensuring that the AWS cloud remains elastic for its customers by taking care of all of the back-end complexity, enabling our infrastructure to stay ahead of our rapid growth.As an Applied Scientist you will use your experience to develop new strategies to improve the performance of AWS Infrastructure’s planning systems and networks. Working closely with fellow applied scientists and product managers, you will use your experience in modeling, optimization, and simulation to design novel algorithms and models of new policies, simulate their performance, and evaluate their benefits and impacts to cost, reliability, and speed of our supply chain.We are looking for experience in network and combinatorial optimization, algorithms, data structures, statistics, and/or machine learning. You will have an opportunity to work on large mathematical problems, with large elements of unpredictability. You will write and solve linear and mixed-integer problems to find optimal solutions to build decisions given capacity constraints and the demand distributions. You will also drive process changes that comes with automation and smarter optimization.Key job responsibilities· Design and develop mathematical, simulation and optimization models and apply them to define strategic and tactical needs and drive the appropriate business and technical solutions in the areas of inventory management, network flow, supply chain optimization, demand planning.· Apply theories of mathematical optimization, including linear programming, combinatorial optimization, integer programming, dynamic programming, network flows and algorithms to design optimal or near optimal solution methodologies to be used by in-house decision support tools and software.· Prototype these models by using modeling languages such as R, MATLAB, Mosel or in software languages such as Python.· Create, enhance, and maintain technical documentation, and present to other Scientists, Product, and Engineering teams.· Lead project plans from a scientific perspective by managing product features, technical risks, milestones and launch plans· Influence organization's long term roadmap and resourcing, onboard new technologies onto Science team's toolbox, mentor other Scientists.About the teamThe AWS Infrastructure Supply Chain Technology Applied Research team drives technological advances and develops machine learning, optimization and simulation products to address complex challenges in the AWS Infrastructure supply chain.We sit at the intersection of science and engineering, and innovate on behalf of customers to solve ambiguous problems that haven’t quite been fully articulated or even anticipated.

Senior Data Scientist, Sponsored Products Supply

US, NY, New York

Exciting new opportunity as the founding team member for Sponsored Products beyond the retail store!If you are looking to make an impact, this is the team for you. You will not only have the satisfaction of seeing your work directly on the Amazon website and beyond where it will be viewed by tens of millions of customers and drive quantifiable revenue impact, with the opportunity to help shape our engineering and product roadmaps. We are not bound by legacy systems and have a broad mandate to experiment, which gives us great flexibility as we design and develop our services. You will have an opportunity to contribute across the full stack and even dabble in some novel Machine Learning opportunities. Most importantly, you will have an opportunity to grow and broaden your technical skills as you work in an environment that thrives on creativity, experimentation, and product innovation.Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!As a Senior Data Scientist on this team you will:· Lead Data Science solutions from beginning to end.· Deliver with independence on challenging large-scale problems with complexity and ambiguity.· Write code (Python, R, Scala, SQL, etc.) to obtain, manipulate, and analyze data.· Build Machine Learning and statistical models to solve specific business problems.· Retrieve, synthesize, and present critical data in a format that is immediately useful to answering specific questions or improving system performance.· Analyze historical data to identify trends and support optimal decision making.· Apply statistical and machine learning knowledge to specific business problems and data.· Formalize assumptions about how our systems should work, create statistical definitions of outliers, and develop methods to systematically identify outliers. Work out why such examples are outliers and define if any actions needed.· Given anecdotes about anomalies or generate automatic scripts to define anomalies, deep dive to explain why they happen, and identify fixes.· Build decision-making models and propose effective solutions for the business problems you define.· Conduct written and verbal presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication.Why you will love this opportunity: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are a highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.Impact and Career Growth: You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.Team video ~ https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE

Economist - New Seller Success, New Seller Success Science Team (SPARC)

US, WA, Seattle

Job summaryAre you passionate to join an innovative team of scientists who use machine learning and statistical techniques to create state-of-the-art solutions to help Selling Partners and Customers on Amazon? Want to work on the business that is the lifeblood of Amazon? Selling on Amazon is one of the fastest growing businesses at Amazon.com and empowers millions of entrepreneurs worldwide. Our team will invent and innovate across technology, processes and people to grow the program, improve engagement and satisfaction and enable scalable solutions.We are looking for an Economist to lead us to identify data-driven insight and opportunities to improve our seller recruitment strategy and drive new seller success. As a successful economist on our talented team of scientists and engineers, you will solve complex problems to identify actionable opportunities, and collaborate with engineering, research, and business teams for future innovation. You need to be a sophisticated user of econometric models and advanced quantitative techniques for answering specific business questions, and an expert at synthesizing and communicating insights and recommendations to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. You will continue to contribute to the research community, by working with economists and scientists across Amazon, as well as collaborating with academic researchers and publishing papers (www.aboutamazon.com/research).What you'll do:· Provide data-driven guidance and recommendations on strategic questions posed by the NSS leadership.· Design and analysis of account coverage experiments and define and analyze success metrics across sales team optimization, marketing and new seller education and recommendation programs.. Conduct, direct, and coordinate all phases of research projects, demonstrating skill in all stages of the analysis process, including defining key research questions, recommending measures, working with multiple data sources, evaluating methodology and design, executing analysis plans, interpreting and communicating results.· Provide technical and scientific guidance to your team members, both junior and senior.· Communicate effectively with senior management as well as with colleagues from science, engineering, and business backgrounds.

Applied Science Manager

GB, London

Are you interested in delighting Alexa customers around the world? We have a unique position in the Alexa AI Knowledge team to solve interesting problems related to speech recognition and question-answering, across the languages we support.Our challenge is to ensure Alexa answers every question in any language, on any topic, at any time. "Who won the football match?", "How long till Diwali?", "How old is Dresden Cathedral?" We aim to answer these questions the first time they are asked in a way that’s natural, engaging and fun.We’re looking for an Applied Science Manager to lead a cross-functional team in developing novel techniques (e.g. deep neural network architectures) and deploying them to production toward our end goal of reducing the friction customers feel when Alexa doesn’t understand a user’s spoken question or when it requires repeating or rephrasing to get an answer. The ideal candidate has the requisite background and experience in building high-performing, collaborative teams. This person is versed in cutting-edge research and has an eye for hiring and developing talent.We have an opportunity to make a large and long-lasting impact for our customers. This job will test your skills across the board. Interesting problems? Check. Collaborative, curious and caring team? Check. Opportunities to invent at scale? Check. Opportunities to grow our exceptional talent? Check.Our challenges are big and the pace is fast. We provide a high-energy, empathetic, and supportive environment. Come join us if you like to put the customer at the center, invent, and think long-term. At Amazon, it's still Day 1.This position is based in London.

Senior Applied Scientist, Product Knowledge

US, NY, New York City

Job summaryIn the Amazon Product Knowledge Team, we are building comprehensive schematic and semantic constructs to understand customer intent, in order to provide a delightful experience that feels targeted to their shopping mission. It expands beyond factual product characteristics (e.g. resolution of a TV) to additional dimensions used in customer shopping missions: what the product is used for (e.g. baby-proofing), where the product is used (e.g. kitchen), who uses the product (e.g. teenager), when the product is used (e.g. thanksgiving), and opinions about the product (e.g. cute t-shirt). We build scalable solutions that are partially or entirely powered by AI and ML to discover Product Knowledge by mining seller signals and customer engagements (e.g. search queries, customer reviews, web pages, etc).We have multiple positions for applied scientists who are excited to work on big data challenges including; web scale data integration, natural language processing, discovery of new relationships along with their semantics, knowledge inferencing and enhancement, knowledge embedding, entity recognition, and improving data quality to support strategic and tactical decision-making in building Product Knowledge.We are looking for applied scientists with experience in building practical solutions who can work closely with software engineers to ship and automate solutions in production. Our applied scientists also collaborate and partner with teams across Amazon to understand and reflect on how to create benefit for every customer.

AWS Computer Vision Team - Senior Applied Science Manager

US, CA, Pasadena

Job summaryJoin us in a historic endeavor to make Computer Vision accessible to the world with breakthrough research! The AWS AI Labs Computer Vision team has a world-leading team of researchers and academics. We develop the algorithms and models that power AWS computer vision services, such as Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, and Amazon Lookout for Vision, and we conduct and publish long-term research in broad areas of computer vision.We are looking for a senior applied science manager to join us and make the AI revolution happen through innovative research inspired by customer needs. As a Senior Applied Science Manager, you will identify research directions, create and execute roadmaps for forward-looking research and communicate them to senior leadership. You will partner with product teams to define what’s feasible while pushing the envelope on what’s possible. You will work closely with engineering teams to bring research to production. You will manage and lead multiple teams of talented scientists and science leaders, and grow the team by attracting the best scientists in computer vision and deep learning. You are expected to develop innovative solutions to hard problems, and lead your teams to publish your research results at peer reviewed conferences and workshops.AWS, the world-leading provider of cloud services, has fostered the creation and growth of countless new businesses, and is a positive force for good. Our customers bring problems which will give scientists endless opportunities to see their research have a positive and immediate impact in the world. You will have the opportunity to partner with technology and business teams to solve real-world problems, have access to virtually endless data and computational resources, and to world-class engineers and developers that can help bring your ideas into the world.Our research themes include, but are not limited to: few-shot learning, transfer learning, unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, multimodal learning, semi-automated data annotation, large scale image and video recognition, face detection and recognition, document OCR and scene text recognition, document understanding, and geometric computer vision.We are currently located in the US (Seattle, Pasadena, and Bay Area) and Israel (Haifa and Tel Aviv). We are open to candidates interested in working either virtually or remotely from another Amazon location. Additional locations include San Diego and New York City.About Us Inclusive Team CultureHere at AWS, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have ten employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We have innovative benefit offerings, and host annual and ongoing learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon (gender diversity) conferences. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 14 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Work/Life BalanceOur team puts a high value on work-life balance. It isn’t about how many hours you spend at home or at work; it’s about the flow you establish that brings energy to both parts of your life. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We offer flexibility in working hours and encourage you to find your own balance between your work and personal lives.Mentorship & Career GrowthOur team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we’re building an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects based on what will help each team member develop into a better-rounded engineer and enable them to take on more complex tasks in the future.

HFE Research Science Leader, Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE)

US, TN, Nashville

Job summaryAmazon’s vision is to be Earth’s safest place to work. As part of the vision to be Earth’s safest place to work, we are undertaking a multi-year initiative to reduce musculoskeletal disorders in our operations by 40% by 2025. The practice of Human Factors/Ergonomics within our company is key to achieving this goal. We are seeking a Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) Research Science Leader to spearhead applied research projects using advanced technologies that will translate to real world solutions and define industry leading best practices. We are looking for an exceptional researcher, someone that is excited to work on complex challenges for which a comprehensive scientific approach is necessary to drive solutions. Your investigations will define human factor /ergonomic thresholds resulting in design and implementation of safe and efficient workspaces and processes for our associates, and beyond.Key job responsibilitiesYour responsibilities include:1. Identifying cross organizational challenges for which a rigorous research approach is necessary to invent and simplify.2. Working with senior leadership to determine research strategy and direction.3. Initiating, leading, and managing complex laboratory and field-studies using state-of-the-art methodologies, including.a. Managing and mentoring of assigned project personnel.b. Developing of custom data acquisition and analysis software solutions.c. Seeding the translation of research findings to cross functional stakeholders in design, engineering, safety, and operational groups.4. Develop programs to ensure senior executives and decision makers in the organization are up to speed on important trends, tools, and technologies and how these may positively affect our operations.5. Expand our global focus by supporting distributed teams and building a global research presence.6. Enable learning and application of research skills by designers, engineers, and operational personnel by building programs, platforms, and toolkits that empower them to effectively conduct quality research.7. Travel to our various sites globally to lead and perform studies and gain in-depth operational feedback, up to 40% of your time.

Data Scientist, Employee Relations

US, WA, Virtual Location - Washington

Job summaryAmazon’s Employee Relations (ER) team is looking for a Data Scientist (DS) with a demonstrated passion for building innovative new analytics, models, tools and processes for our Employees and Leaders. Are you looking for an opportunity to build in a completely new space that will stretch you and force you to demonstrate your mastery of data science, data analytics, problem solving and enterprise wide deployments? This DS will lead new pioneering ideas from concept to reality and in this role—new bold ideas are always welcome. This DS will obsess over the Amazon employee experience and the employee voice across the organization. This DS will directly apply their knowledge to dig deep and help Amazon leaders gain actionable insights. Finding, prioritizing and resolving employee experience defects will be the mission every day. Thus, the challenge of this role is that it is never complete; we will always strive to push Amazon to be the Earth’s best employer.The Data Scientist will play a critical role in advancing our mission. You will join a tight-knit team of ER professionals, including HR, operational, program, product, tech and legal leaders. You will be supporting Amazon's World Wide Corporate, Consumer and Operations (WWCC & Ops) portfolio, and have direct impact on the daily work of over 1.3M+ Amazonians.Our projects span multiple organizations and require coordination of experimentation, economic and causal analysis, forecasting, dashboarding and predictive machine learning tools. We’re looking for an enthusiastic technical expert and storyteller to explore the world of Amazon data to generate insights—connecting employee experiences to decision makers in a compelling way backed by data. Your focus will cover all aspects of how we learn more about our employees, uncover problems that need to be solved, and validate the impact of our solutions. You will work with other thinkers, creators, and communicators to build the skills of the entire team to create a research-driven organization. You will invent, refine solutions from start to finish—data sets, queries, models, reports, dashboards, analyses—to answer business questions while ensuring we are meeting the needs of the business and team goals. You will draw on your knowledge of data science best practices, big data management fundamentals, and analysis principles to build solutions that enable effective, data-driven business decisions. You will learn the business context and technologies behind your team’s data infrastructure and work with customers (e.g., researchers, economists, data engineers, business intelligence engineers, product managers) and other internal partners to ensure deliverables are aligned with expectations.If you love getting to the “a-ha” moment, when the solution to a customer or employee problem reveals itself in the data— let’s talk!Key job responsibilities• Own the design, development, and maintenance of scalable solutions for analyses and models.• Create innovative, sophisticated analytic models to address critical issues but also meet key business criteria (cost/risk/business impact) and key technical criteria (reliability/validity/predictability)• Lead technical aspects of experiment design in collaboration with the greater ER team.• Find and create ways to measure the workforce experience at multiple levels in the organization.• Identify and advocate for technical options related to machine learning, data mining, and other statistical approaches• Document feasibility requirements, code comments and other technical documentation required to transfer knowledge to other technical staff and management• Write queries and have in-depth knowledge of the data available in area of responsibility.• Troubleshoot operational data-quality issues and review/audit existing ETL jobs and queries.• Collaborate on developing effective Dashboards to surface insights to senior leadership• Communicate pros and cons of analytic frameworks to the development team• Uncover drivers, impacts, and key influences on productivity and innovation outcomes• Develop predictive and optimization models for key applications• Navigate a variety of data sources, such as open text comments, survey results and free text fields inputs• Ability to work in a highly collaborative environment with peers that have a range of technical aptitudes• Maintain an understanding of the latest trends in data science and machine learning• Recommend improvements to back-end data sources for increased accuracy and simplicity.About the teamThe Employee Relations team is responsible for the identification of defects in our employee experience across all roles in the WWC & Ops organization and beyond. Finding these defects is not enough though; we are tasked with building and deploying products, tools and solutions to remove these defects. Our products and programs are always changing and we continually innovate to transform and improve the employee experience.

Applied Scientist - Amazon Air Science and Technology, Air Science and Technology

US, WA, Bellevue

Job summaryThe Amazon Air Science and Technology team is seeking an Applied Scientist to be part of a team solving complex aviation operations problems to reduce cost and improve performance. This is a blue-sky role that gives you a chance to bring optimization modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning advancements to data analytics for customer-facing solutions in complex industrial settings.You will work closely with product, research science and technical leaders throughout Amazon Air, Amazon Delivery Technology and Supply Chain Optimization and will be responsible for influencing funding decisions in areas of investment that you identify as critical future product offerings. You will partner with software developers and data scientists to build end-to-end data pipelines and production code, and you will have exposure to senior leadership as we communicate results and provide scientific guidance to the business. You will analyze large amounts of business data, build the machine learning or optimization models that will enable us to continually delight our customers worldwide.The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in Science work, business analytics and have the aptitude to incorporate new approaches and methodologies while dealing with ambiguities. Excellent business and communication skills are a must to develop and define key business questions and build models that answer those questions. You should have a demonstrated ability to think strategically and analytically about business, product, and technical challenges. Further, you must have the ability to build and communicate compelling value propositions, and work across the organization to achieve consensus. This role requires a strong passion for customers, a high level of comfort navigating ambiguity, and a keen sense of ownership and drive to deliver results.Tasks/ Responsibilities:· Partnership with the engineering and operations to drive modeling and design for complex business problems.· Design and prototype decision support tools (product) to automate standardized processes and optimize trade-offs across the full decision space.· Contribute to the mid- and long-term strategic planning studies and analysis.· Lead complex transportation modeling analyses to aid management in making key business decisions and set new policies.

Economist Manager, Grocery Management Science

US, WA, Seattle

Job summaryThe F3 (Fresh, Food, Fast) organization enables customers to buy fresh groceries, household essentials, and most popular products from Amazon.com. Our business is global and we lead the innovation in ultra-fast grocery delivery and physical stores experience (Just Walk Out technology) to delight customers more than ever before. As our business is rapidly scaling up, we need to continue developing and improving scalable economic and science solutions to support business growth and better customer experience.We are looking for an economist manager to build a team of scientist and determine the long-term vision for how we set prices in F3. In this cross-functional role, you will partner and work closely with SDEs, business stakeholders, finance, BIEs, and product managers to determine and execute on optimal pricing online and in stores. As a thought leader, you will clearly communicate your vision, models, and results to influence a variety of senior stakeholders. You and your team will apply a battery of economic (demand estimation, casual inference, time series forecasting, etc.) and ML (prediction, outlier detection, cluster analysis, NLP/NLU, etc.) methods. You will own the whole cycle of model development including ideation, prototyping, validation, experimentation, and integrating models into production systems while working with a dedicated team of SDEs.Key job responsibilities· Lead strategic vision for product pricing, define roadmaps, and write PRFAQs, while balancing multiple business objectives.· Build, manage, and coach a high-performing team of economists and scientists; review and audit modeling processes and results.· Set team priorities and help the team to choose the right science methods while balancing delivering high impact with raising the science bar at Amazon.· Lead global complex product launches from a scientific perspective including identifying key milestones, potential risks, and paths to mitigate risks.· Partner and work closely with a dedicated team of engineers to put scientific solutions in a production system.· Write technical and business-facing documents to clearly explain complex technical concepts to audiences with diverse business/scientific backgrounds.

Alexa & Friends features Gokhan Tur, Alexa AI senior principal scientist

Hear Tur discuss his experience from his work on DARPA programs, how he’s seen the field of conversational AI evolve, and more.

Work with us