Social
Andrew Borthwick
Andrew Borthwick, an Amazon principal scientist, shares his insights related to helping organize a company-wide challenge for one of the company's internal science events, and on how, despite the company's decentralized approach to science and engineering, the company still fosters collaboration and a sense of community among scientists.
Credit: Andrew Borthwick
Machine learning

Fostering a culture of innovation

An Amazon principal scientist describes how an internal challenge has fostered greater collaboration and a sense of community among the company’s scientists.

By Andrew Borthwick
March 9, 2021
7 min read
Share

Editor’s Note: Andrew Borthwick is a principal scientist at Amazon; he leads a team focusing on challenges of automatic machine learning over Amazon’s expansive product catalog. In this article, he describes his experience in helping organize a Challenge within the company’s annual, internal machine-learning conference, which brings together thousands of scientists and engineers from across the company to showcase their work, network with peers, and raise the quality of science at the company.

More than 4,000 scientists and engineers attended last fall’s virtual, online event, with the opportunity to view keynote, oral paper, and poster presentations, along with workshops, training sessions, and other activities.

In this article, Borthwick shares his experience in helping organize one of the conference’s Challenge events, and provides insight into how, despite the company’s highly decentralized approach to science and engineering, the company fosters collaboration and a sense of community among scientists.

There is a huge amount of innovation in machine learning at Amazon. So much, in fact, that it can be difficult to keep track of all of the cool ideas percolating among teams. To help Amazonians push the state of the art forward, we have an annual internal Amazon Machine Learning Conference (AMLC). This conference is structured similarly to well-known academic conferences, with a process of papers being peer reviewed, and a high bar for acceptance.

I’ve been working in machine learning at Amazon for six years now and have served as a reviewer and meta-reviewer of papers for AMLC many times. Although reviewing papers has been a stimulating opportunity in that it has allowed me to see the great diversity of machine learning research here at Amazon, I sometimes found myself stymied when deciding on the merits of an idea.

There is a huge amount of innovation in machine learning at Amazon. So much, in fact, that it can be difficult to keep track of all of the cool ideas percolating among teams.
Andrew Borthwick

Amazon is well known for a culture of “two pizza teams”. We try to reduce Amazon’s very large scale into chunks of work that can be attacked by a team of people small enough that they can be fed with two pizzas (in practice these teams are typically five to eight in size, so the pizzas should definitely be large). Each team can then be customer obsessed in focusing on the opportunity they are targeting. In machine learning, this has a major advantage in allowing us to be agile — we don’t spend too much time coordinating with other teams — so teams are free to experiment with approaches. The downside to this approach is that it can lead to a duplication of effort, and an inability to identify the best scientific approach.

I have frequently reviewed papers that presented data where some team had greatly increased the accuracy of their machine learning algorithm relative to their previous approach, and had  delivered significant customer value.  This sounds good, but one of the Amazon Leadership Principles is that we should “Insist on the Highest Standards”. I would ask myself, “Yes, what this paper is describing is great, but is this the best that could be done here?”

The problem was most acute when you had separate two-pizza teams working on very similar challenges. One of my areas of expertise is in linking records in databases, which led to my work on AWS Lake Formation FindMatches. We’re doing some really interesting science in this area:  one team is working on finding duplicate items in Amazon’s product catalog while another is working on identifying sets of products that are variants of one another (when buying Amazon Essentials Crewneck t-shirts, for instance, you will see all the different colors and sizes on the same page). These problems are similar in that a customer might want to see if two products “match”, but in one case they are looking for an “exact match”, while in the other they want to find “products that match if you ignore color and size differences”.

We had a similar issue with machine learning classification problems.

One two-pizza team was working on the problem of classifying Amazon products as to which customer-facing product type they belong to (such as “women’s sneakers”). Meanwhile another team was classifying items into categories that sometimes have a special treatment for sales tax purposes (for instance “alcoholic beverage” or “children’s clothing” or “food” or “medicine”). Amazon Music has a similar problem with classifying music tracks as to genre (is it “holiday music” or “instrumental jazz” or “string quartet”?).

Each of these teams was working on classifying items into a fairly large, but fixed number of classes, a problem known in machine learning as “k-way classification”. The items being classified (either products or music tracks) had many different attributes which were of different data types such as text (product_description, music_track_title), numeric (shipping_weight), categorical (color, size), and image (the picture of the product or the album cover), so we said that this was “k-way classification of multimodal tabular data”. Finally, each of these teams had a substantial number of labeled records where an Amazon employee had determined the correct category. We dubbed this challenge as “supervised k-way classification of multimodal tabular data” —  a very important but understudied problem in ML.

The problem came when each of these teams submitted a paper describing their results to the Amazon Machine Learning Conference.  The questions I had to resolve as a reviewer were: “Who has the better algorithm”? and “This other two-pizza team is working on a very similar problem. What would happen if they used the other team’s algorithm on their data”?

AMLC Panel Discussion
The MultiModal Tabular Data Challenge Workshop included a question-and-answer session with competition finalists and scientists from the competition's organizing committee.

These kinds of questions led some of my machine learning colleagues and me to organize an internal “Grand Challenge in MultiModal Tabular Data”. Organizing a competition like this is a big task, but there are similar examples in the global ML community. Our first project was to gather and organize k-way classification and matching datasets from two-pizza teams across Amazon.

Next we had a kick-off meeting where we announced the competition and the prizes ($1000 in Amazon gift cards for the best average performance on the matching tasks and the best average performance on the classification tasks).

The contest itself lasted for four months, with more than 50 teams submitting results, and culminated with a workshop at AMLC last October. There the top three teams in the Matching and K-Way Classification challenges described their systems.

In reflecting on the Challenge, we found a number of positive effects:

  • The competition was a fun activity, with more than 50 teams and over 100 participants. Many participants enthusiastically made dozens of attempts at the different competitions.
  • Because a reverence for rank and titles is not one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles, the Challenge placed participants of all levels, locations, and job titles on equal footing.
  • One of the key challenges for the organizing committee was the need to standardize all of the data for the different tasks according to the same conventions (for instance, we made all of the data available with similar schemas in two popular formats —.csv and .parquet). This data is now available for future Amazon research projects, and thus future papers submitted to the conference.  
  • Two of the top six solutions made heavy use of AWS’ new open source Automated Machine Learning toolkit, AutoGluon, including one of the Grand Prize winners. Ideas from these Challenge entrants also made their way back into the AutoGluon toolkit, particularly around improving AutoGluon’s ability to handle textual columns in a tabular dataset.
  • Researchers benefited because these datasets are more complex and representative of real-world problems than most datasets in the public domain. In particular, it is difficult for researchers to get their hands on datasets where the correct decision hinges on signals derived from a combination of complex text, image, numeric, and categorical attributes.
  • More generally, the Challenge has helped to encourage closer teamwork among  different two-pizza teams working on similar problems. I’ve been in a number of meetings with teams working on a task that was in the Challenge or on problems that were similar to one of those tasks, where we have discussed ideas for leveraging the learnings from the winning teams.
  • Finally, for me, the Challenge led me to join the Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems team, which was one of the main contributors of data to the project. One of the great things about working here is the opportunity to switch to a team that you are passionate about.
Research areas
Tags
About the Author
Andrew Borthwick

Related content

Work with us

See more jobs See more jobs
Senior Applied Scientist, Amazon Connect
US, NY, New York
Are you excited about applying machine learning and statistical modeling to real-world systems that serve millions of customers? Amazon Connect is a cloud-based contact center service that helps businesses deliver personal, efficient customer experiences. Our team of scientists and engineers builds the AI and ML capabilities that power contact center operations and optimization. We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to tackle scientifically complex challenges in areas such as stochastic modeling, queueing theory, anomaly detection, and optimization. In this role, you will design and deploy novel ML models and algorithms that directly improve how businesses interact with their customers. You will work at the intersection of research and production, turning ambiguous problems into scalable solutions that shape the future of cloud-based customer service. Key job responsibilities - Design and deploy novel machine learning models and algorithms to solve complex problems in contact center operations, including forecasting, routing optimization, and anomaly detection. - Lead the scientific agenda for your team by identifying new research opportunities, proposing initiatives, and driving them from concept through production deployment. - Collaborate with engineering teams to architect and implement scalable ML systems, personally contributing significant portions of the critical scientific components. - Mentor fellow scientists and engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and scientific guidance, raising the overall technical bar of the team. - Evaluate and advance the team's ML methodology by benchmarking against current academic and industry research, and by publishing findings internally and externally when appropriate. A day in the life You might start your morning reviewing experiment results from a new forecasting model, then join a design session with engineers to discuss how to integrate it into the production pipeline. After lunch, you could be whiteboarding a novel approach to a queueing optimization problem with a fellow scientist, followed by a code review for a teammate. You will regularly present your research findings to stakeholders across the organization and contribute to the team's publication efforts. About the team Our team within Amazon Connect focuses on building intelligent, ML-driven capabilities that help businesses run their contact centers more effectively. We work closely with product, engineering, and science partners to turn research ideas into features that customers rely on every day. We value curiosity, collaboration, and scientific rigor, and we are investing in new AI capabilities that will continue to transform the customer service industry. If you want to see your research make a tangible impact at scale, this is the place to do it.
Applied Scientist I, Amazon Shipping
IN, HR, Gurugram
Building large-scale forecasting and optimization systems that power Amazon’s global transportation network and directly impact customer experience and cost. Key job responsibilities 1. Guide model and system design across a range of techniques, including tree-based models, deep learning (LSTMs, transformers), LLMs, and reinforcement learning. 2. Ensure models are production-ready, scalable, and robust through close partnership with stakeholders. 3. Partner with Product, Operations, and Engineering leaders to enable proactive decision-making and corrective actions. 4 Own end-to-end business metrics, directly influencing customer experience, cost optimization, and network reliability. 5. Help contribute to the broader ML community through publications, conference submissions, and internal knowledge sharing.
Applied Scientist, Customer360
US, WA, Seattle
What happens when you give AI the ability to remember? Not cached responses — real structured memory that compounds over time and transfers across contexts. We're building the science behind this, and we need researchers who want to own the problem end-to-end. This is a founding role on a new team. You won't inherit models or maintain someone else's pipeline. You'll define the research direction, run experiments at scale, and ship what works directly to production. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in our team, you will be responsible for the research, design, and development of new AI technologies for knowledge acquisition and retrieval. You will adopt or invent new machine learning and analytical techniques in the realm of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and large language models. Specific responsibilities include: 1. Design and implement novel approaches to knowledge extraction from heterogeneous, unstructured data sources at organizational scale. 2. Build retrieval systems that match intent to relevant knowledge across domains — solving the "right memory at the right time" problem. 3. Own the quality of memory generation: what to capture, how to structure it, when to surface it, and when to let it decay. 4. Run large-scale experiments using Amazon's compute infrastructure and massive real-world datasets. 5. Develop evaluation frameworks for a system where "quality" means something new — right knowledge, right context, right confidence level. 6. Collaborate with engineers to move from research prototype to production system in weeks, not quarters. 7. Invent new approaches to temporal knowledge management — how memories age, conflict, and compound over time. 8. Publish and patent novel approaches to knowledge acquisition and retrieval at top-tier venues. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate insights and opportunities, execute experiments, and develop statistical and ML models. The team is driven by business needs, which requires collaboration with other Scientists, Engineers, and Product Managers across the organization. You get to influence stakeholders with clear communication skills. You innovate on behalf of the customer and strategically build features. You will mentor junior members and help them grow. About the team We're a new team within Personalization, focused on a different kind of recommendation: not "what product should this customer see" but "what knowledge should this AI use right now." Same scale, same rigor, entirely new problem space. The science is at the intersection of information retrieval, knowledge representation, and LLM reasoning — and the right approach hasn't been established yet. The team values innovation and offers a safe place to try, fail, and learn while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Everyone is a leader and owner for everything we do as a team. We offer creative space with an entrepreneurial work environment focusing on customer obsession.
Applied Scientist, SCOT FO - SnT
ES, B, Barcelona
How does Amazon decide which fulfillment center ships your order, which truck carries it, and how to keep promises across hundreds of millions of packages daily? How does it decide how many trucks and how much labor are required to ship orders across the network? SCOT Fulfillment Optimization (FO) owns the optimization and forecasting science behind these decisions. We are seeking Applied Scientists to join the FO Science & Tech team in Barcelona (alternatively: Luxembourg or London) with a strong academic background in optimization, machine learning, and/or time-series forecasting. • You will design and build state-of-the-art machine learning and optimization models that power Amazon's fulfillment decisions at an unprecedented scale across two core scientific pillars: • Large-Scale Optimization and Planning: Designing planning systems for order assignment and resource utilization, while balancing multi-objective cost-speed tradeoffs to enable controllers to steer millions of shipments per hour optimally. • Demand Forecasting & Predictive ML: Developing time-series forecasts for customer demand, incorporating contextual information (weather, sales, order properties), and modeling uncertainty for core planning systems. Basic qualifications • PhD in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience) • Strong programming skills (Python preferred; experience with optimization solvers a plus) • Research experience in one or more: • Large-scale mathematical programming (LP, MIP, decomposition methods) • Combinatorial optimization (assignment, scheduling, network flows) • Multi-objective optimization and control • Large-scale time-series forecasting (GenAI models, probabilistic forecasting, uncertainty quantification) • Causal inference (spatiotemporal causal modeling, offline policy evaluation) Preferred qualifications • Experience building optimization systems that run in production at scale • Being comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration cycles • Publications in relevant venues Key job responsibilities Design and implement optimization and forecasting models for large-scale fulfillment problems, from order assignment to network flow control. Build research prototypes end-to-end: from problem formulation through scalable implementation to production validation. Analyse complex tradeoffs (cost, speed, capacity, accuracy) and translate findings into actionable recommendations for leadership and operations teams. Collaborate with engineers to bring science solutions into production systems serving millions of customer orders daily. A day in the life You formulate an optimization or forecasting problem on a whiteboard with teammates, then prototype it in Python with real data by the afternoon. You run experiments against production-scale datasets, iterate on the model, and present results to stakeholders who will use them to make network decisions next week. Some days you dive deep into solver performance; other days you're explaining a Pareto frontier to an operations leader. You collaborate with large engineering and product teams to bring your solutions into systems serving millions of customers. Alongside fast-turnaround prototypes, you own long-term research bets, the kind that reshape how Amazon's fulfillment network operates at scale. Your work goes live. About the team SCOT Fulfillment Optimization Science & Tech (FO SnT) is the applied research team behind Amazon's fulfillment decision-making systems. We decide how orders get assigned to warehouses, how capacity is allocated across the network, and how cost and speed tradeoffs are managed in real time, at global scale. Our models influence billions of euros in annual operational spend. They protect sites from overload during peak, reduce transportation costs and CO2 emissions, and ensure customers receive their packages when promised. Leadership relies on our science to make investment decisions worth hundreds of millions. We are practitioners of large-scale optimization: MIP formulations, decomposition methods, approximation algorithms, and parallelisation. We use machine learning where it sharpens our decisions, including forecasting, learned heuristics, and multi-armed bandits. We pick the right tool for the problem, not the fashionable one. You will work alongside Senior and Principal scientists, and collaborate with Amazon Scholars and academic partners who bring frontier research into our applied problems. We code our prototypes to be production-ready and collaborate with large engineering teams to ship systems, not papers. Above all, we have fun solving hard real-world problems at real-world speed, failing, learning, and shipping along the way.
Data Scientist II, Device Economics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking Data Scientist II with strong science application skills to join our Device Economics team. This role will focus primarily on Amazon's innovative devices and services (e.g. Echo Family of Devices), working at the intersection of economic modeling, forecasting science, and business strategy. The ideal candidate will be responsible for pre-launch forecasts, annualized overall forecasts, identifying substitution patterns, and partnering closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand the evolution of the Devices portfolio. Key job responsibilities Forecasting & Modeling 1. Develop and maintain pre-launch forecasts and annualized overall forecasts for Amazon Devices 2. Identify and model substitution patterns across the device portfolio 3. Build economic and financial models to support demand planning and business decisions 4. Formulate relevant analytical frameworks to address key economic issues in device forecasting Science Communication & Collaboration 1. Explain complex science models and methodologies to non-technical stakeholders including product managers and marketing managers 2. Collaborate with economists, data scientists, and applied scientists across Decision Science 3. Present results of analyses to cross-functional teams and leadership 4. Build trust in science models and forecast outputs with product teams Innovation & Strategic Thinking 1. Think creatively about ways that leading-edge analytics and emerging data sources can address Devices' most pressing business challenges 2. Help internal teams leverage analytic tools to better manage innovation 3. Conduct empirical studies and perform quantitative and qualitative research 4. Identify opportunities to improve forecasting accuracy and business impact Cross-Functional Partnership 1. Work closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand portfolio evolution and business strategy 2. Support DSO leadership in quarterly business reviews and strategic planning A day in the life Your days will be split between refining and building models and working with business leaders to interpret them. You own science-based forecasts that can directly impact Amazon's bottom line on the order of multi-million dollar decisions. - You will perform model refreshes or updates to analyses as needed; and, - You will be expected to develop new techniques to process large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to design of automated systems. About the team The Decision Science team within DSO (Device Supply Organization) is responsible for forecasting and demand planning initiatives across Amazon Devices. The DSO team of 300+ engineers, scientists, and PMs applies quantitative methods and data-driven approaches to replace judgment-based decisions with science-driven forecasts. Decision Science focuses on lifetime demand forecasting using econometric and machine learning models for rapid reforecasting, mix adjustments, and portfolio management for new product launches. We also inform to go/no-go investment decision for new product initiatives
Applied Scientist II, Amazon Supply Chain
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join our team that is building enterprise applications leveraging machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI to help millions of companies worldwide manage their day-to-day supply chain operations. Our mission is to accelerate our customers' businesses through intuitive, differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring supply chain challenges. We blend strategic vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world operational experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions that make the 'buy versus build' decision a no-brainer for our customers. As an Applied Scientist, you will design and develop machine learning models and algorithms that power intelligent supply chain applications at global scale. You will work at the intersection of research and real-world product impact, translating scientific advances into production systems that serve millions of customers. We operate like a startup within AWS, offering you the opportunity to tackle complex challenges while working with the latest technologies in deep learning, large language models, and optimization. If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of applied science, thrive in ambiguous problem spaces, and want to shape the future of supply chain intelligence while having the backing of AWS's extensive resources, we want to hear from you. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models for demand forecasting, inventory optimization, anomaly detection, and supply chain decision-making. - Develop generative AI and agentic AI solutions that automate complex supply chain workflows and deliver intelligent, adaptive recommendations to customers. - Formulate real-world business problems as machine learning problems; define data requirements, model architectures, evaluation metrics, and experimentation frameworks. - Drive end-to-end applied science projects from ideation through experimentation, offline evaluation, A/B testing, and production deployment at scale. - Collaborate with engineering, product management, and business stakeholders to translate scientific capabilities into customer-facing product features, and mentor other scientists to raise the team's technical bar. A day in the life You will start many mornings reviewing experiment results and model metrics before joining a science sync where you and your teammates discuss progress, debug tricky modeling issues, and brainstorm new approaches. From there, you may spend focused time writing and testing model code in Python or PyTorch, running offline evaluations, or preparing an A/B test for a new forecasting algorithm. Expect regular working sessions with software engineers to integrate your models into production services, and occasional deep-dive reviews where you present your scientific approach and findings to the broader team. About the team The AWS Applied AI Solutions team builds enterprise applications that leverage Amazon's operational expertise to solve real-world supply chain challenges for millions of companies. We operate like a startup within AWS, moving fast and shipping iteratively with modern AI technologies. We invest in your growth through mentorship from experienced scientists, conference publication support, and internal science reading groups. If your career hasn't followed a traditional path, we encourage you to apply — we value varied experiences and perspectives.
Manager, Applied Science- Manipulation & Autonomy , Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to drive the development of next-generation manipulation and autonomy systems for robots operating in complex, real-world environments. This role is designed for an exceptional technical leader with a strong research background and a passion for translating cutting-edge ideas into working robotic systems. You will play a central role in defining the technical direction of our manipulation and autonomy stack, from problem formulation and algorithm design to system integration and real-world deployment. While this role is hands-on and deeply technical, it is also expected to evolve toward technical leadership and team building over time. Key job responsibilities - Lead research and development of manipulation and autonomy systems for robots, including planning, control, learning, and closed-loop execution - Design and implement algorithms, especially focused around autonomy and interaction with dynamic environments - Work closely with perception, motor control, hardware, and systems teams to build tightly integrated autonomy pipelines - Define evaluation methodologies, benchmarks, and simulation-to-real workflows for manipulation and autonomy - Stay deeply engaged with the research community, selectively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into deployed systems - Mentor and guide other researchers and engineers, help set technical direction, and contribute to team growth and research culture - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Applied Scientist, AWS Applied AI Solutions - Life Sciences
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide end user applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are easy to adopt and easy to use. The Team Join the next science revolution at AWS Life Sciences Applied AI Solutions, where you'll work alongside world-class scientists to build AI that transforms how therapeutics are discovered, developed, and brought to patients. We're out to revolutionize how medicines are discovered, developed, and brought to patients, powered by a new generation of AI. Our team tackles some of the hardest open problems at the intersection of frontier AI and life sciences. We apply biological foundation models, large language models, and agentic reasoning systems to life sciences problems, then put them into the hands of customers as applications and managed services they can fine-tune, tailor, and deploy on their own data. The science challenges are deep: how do you design agentic systems that reason correctly over complex biological, regulatory, and clinical logic? How do you enable customers to tailor foundation models to their proprietary data and get better outputs with less effort? How do you adapt models to reason faithfully in high-stakes scientific and regulatory domains? Today we're focused on two areas. In clinical trials, we're building AI that automates and optimizes regulatory and clinical development workflows. In drug design, our products (including Amazon Bio Discovery) accelerate discovery by giving bench scientists AI-guided protein engineering and antibody design capabilities. We combine frontier research with production-scale delivery to put breakthrough science into the hands of customers solving humanity's hardest problems. We value scientific rigor, encourage publication, and support conference participation. If you want to do research that ships, this is the team. The Role We are seeking an Applied Scientist to build the models and methods behind our life sciences AI products, with a primary focus on clinical trial operations and agentic reasoning. You will design, train, and evaluate systems that reason over complex clinical and operational logic, and ship them into products customers use directly. You will work closely with senior and principal scientists on well-scoped research problems, own your results end to end, and see your work reach production. This role combines expertise in LLM reasoning and agentic AI with applied impact in life sciences. You will work on how large language models reason, plan, and act in complex scientific domains, while applying domain knowledge to ensure models produce scientifically valid outputs. The problems span multiple fronts: - How do you build LLM-based agentic systems that correctly reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and complex multi-step operational workflows? - How do you evaluate agent reliability and faithfulness rigorously enough to trust in high-stakes clinical settings? - How do you develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that let customers get strong results from foundation models on their own data? You will focus on clinical trial operations (agentic automation, structured reasoning, evaluation, domain adaptation), with opportunities to contribute across drug discovery (protein engineering, antibody design) as the portfolio grows. You will own end-to-end scientific solutions from research through production, and your work will directly shape the tools that scientists use daily. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate LLM-based agentic systems that reason over clinical protocols, regulatory standards, and operational workflows - Build rigorous evaluation harnesses and benchmarks to measure agent reliability, faithfulness, and failure modes in high-stakes domains - Develop model customization methods (fine-tuning, RLHF, retrieval augmentation, domain adaptation) that help customers get better outputs on their own data with less effort - Contribute to graph-based and causal modeling approaches for clinical trial operations - Partner with Life Sciences domain experts, product, and engineering to translate scientific challenges into shipped capabilities - Own experiments end to end: problem framing, implementation, evaluation, iteration, and hand-off to production - Publish at top-tier venues where the work supports it - Contribute to drug discovery efforts (protein engineering, antibody design) as opportunities arise A day in the life - Design and run an experiment to validate a new agentic reasoning or fine-tuning method, then ship it as a capability customers can use - Diagnose why a model is failing on a new class of inputs and implement a fix to unblock a delivery milestone - Build or extend an evaluation benchmark to measure how faithfully an agent reasons over clinical logic - Meet with domain experts to scope what the next model release needs to do - Review results with a senior scientist, sharpen the approach, and get it over the finish line - Prototype a new idea that could become the next capability in the product About the team AWS Solutions As part of the AWS solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. we blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. Diverse Experiences AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses. Inclusive Team Culture AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee-led and company-sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique. Our inclusion events foster stronger, more collaborative teams. Our continual innovation is fueled by the bold ideas, fresh perspectives, and passionate voices our teams bring to everything we do. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
Senior Applied Scientist, Center for Quantum Computing: Device Team
US, CA, Pasadena
As a Senior Quantum Applied Scientist on our Device team, you will be a technical authority and driving force in the design and measurements of novel superconducting qubits. You will lead detailed simulation and measurement efforts to explain experimental results, inform new qubit designs, and optimize device performance, working collaboratively with our design, fabrication, processor, and exploratory research teams. This is a role with significant room for innovation: you will play a key role in finding paths towards more performant devices. We are looking for a seasoned researcher with deep expertise in superconducting circuit physics plus a proven track record of bridging design, simulation, and measurement. Success in this role requires both technical depth and a genuine passion for applied, collaborative work. The ideal candidate will excel at communication across disciplines — translating detailed analyses into actionable guidance for engineering teams — and will bring the experience and judgment to identify innovations that will have the greatest impact. Key job responsibilities • Develop simulations to predict device performance, then design and measure devices that leverage the understood scalings. • Reduce the gap between simulated predictions and measurements by building more accurate models. • Communicate scientific findings across the CQC, and, when appropriate, share results externally via conference presentations and publications in scientific journals • Identify and evaluate emerging research developments that could impact design decisions About the team The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing (CQC) is a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, on a mission to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer.
Sr. Data Scientist, Amazon Pay Data Products
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Pay strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric payments service. Our mission is to serve customers and merchant partners with the most trusted, friction-less and rewarding payment solutions for their needs on and off Amazon. We are seeking an exceptional Data Scientist III to drive innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions while leading high-impact initiatives across the organization. Key job responsibilities Technical Excellence Lead end-to-end machine learning projects using PyTorch, AWS SageMaker, and other leading ML frameworks Design and implement complex statistical models and deep learning solutions Develop and optimize MLOps pipelines for model training, evaluation, and deployment Experience with modern LLM frameworks and Generative AI applications Expertise in Python, R, and related data science libraries MLOps & Development Build automated ML pipelines using AWS services (CodePipeline, Lambda, Step Functions) Implement CI/CD practices for ML model deployment and monitoring Create containerized solutions using Docker for scalable model deployment Experience with model optimization and hyperparameter tuning using tools like Optuna Integrate ML solutions with monitoring tools like MLflow Business Impact & Leadership Partner with stakeholders to translate business problems into technical solutions Design and develop business intelligence applications for real-time insights Lead technical initiatives and mentor junior data scientists Drive cross-functional collaboration to deliver innovative solutions Communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences About the team The Amazon Pay Data Products team is a central unit that builds and maintains data products supporting Amazon Pay's growth across multiple markets. We operate at scale, processing 150M+ monthly transactions and managing 12 PB of data infrastructure. Our team consists of Business Intelligence Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product Managers who develop and maintain standardized reporting, data marts, and self-service analytics tools. Our expanded capabilities cover data science and Gen AI wherein we have built our first suite of multi-agent systems.
See more jobs
View from space of a connected network around planet Earth representing the Internet of Things.
Get more from Amazon Science
Subscribe to our newsletter

Amazon.com | Conditions of Use | Privacy | © 1996-2026 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates

Social