Screenshot shows a portion of the what should I watch experience
The new What Should I Watch (WSIW) experience, released in mid-September, combines Alexa AI and Fire TV recommendations to turn Alexa into an entertainment expert who provides relevant suggestions with a conversational customer experience.

The science behind the new “Alexa, what should I watch?” Fire TV experience

The phrase launches a feature built to help customers navigate an increasingly complex and diverse world of content.

"What should I watch?"

In an entertainment universe filled with a rapidly expanding catalog of shows across myriad channels and apps, this might be one of the most common questions to pop up in many households. And if you are among those who have trouble keeping up with all the latest shows and pinpointing which ones are worth your time, you are not alone.

In fact, more than half of respondents in a recent survey from the consulting firm Deloitte found it difficult to access content across multiple services, and 49% were frustrated if a service failed to provide them with good recommendations. Viewers find themselves surfing … and surfing. It takes the average smart TV owner 12 minutes to land on a show, according to a 2020 survey by Tivo — and for some viewers that can take up to half an hour.

"It's kind of shocking how much time customers have to spend on finding content instead of just sitting down on the couch and jumping into a TV show or a movie that they really enjoy," said Cosmin Laslau, a technical program manager who works on spoken language understanding as part of the Amazon Alexa Entertainment team. "We wanted to leverage new technology to help solve that problem for customers."

Image shows the new Fire TV Cube, left, the Fire TV Omni QLED Series, middle, and the Alexa Voice Remote Pro, right
The What Should I Watch experience works with many Fire TV devices, including the new Fire TV Cube, left, the Fire TV Omni QLED Series, middle, and the Alexa Voice Remote Pro announced at the 2022 Devices and Services event.

The team did that by launching What Should I Watch (WSIW). The new experience, released in mid-September, combines Alexa AI and Fire TV recommendations to turn Alexa into an entertainment expert who provides relevant suggestions with a conversational customer experience. The experience also works with the new Fire TV Cube, the Fire TV Omni QLED Series, and the Alexa Voice Remote Pro announced at the 2022 Devices and Services event.

“We built WSIW to rapidly experiment with new Alexa technologies and push the envelope on discovery experiences to address the core customer need to find something interesting to watch,” explained Parthasarathi Dutta Sharma, a product manager who helped bring WSIW to customers.

WSIW displays personalized recommendations when customers ask, “Alexa, what should I watch?” or a variant of that phrase. Customers can then customize the recommendations using voice prompts (for example, “just the ones that are free to me”) or by using their remote to select filters on the screen, watch trailers, view additional information (eg genre, ratings), and initiate playback.

Related content
Rohit Prasad on the pathway to generalizable intelligence and what excites him most about his re:MARS keynote.

The experience combines innovation for both Fire TV, with its extensive catalog, search and recommendation features, and the conversational AI that drives Alexa.

"We wanted to layer on these new innovations that have been developed around Alexa Conversations specifically," Laslau said. "We've given customers a broad range of natural ways to interact with Alexa, without being limited to a single utterance."

Since previewing WSIW last fall and beginning beta testing with customers, teams have worked to refine the customer experience.

“We used beta testing to closely observe how customers interacted with WSIW and to validate our core hypotheses on what works for customers,” explained Dutta Sharma. “A prime hypothesis we validated was viewers naturally gravitate to using natural language, with variability in inputs, while interacting with Alexa.”

Related content
Dialogue simulator and conversations-first modeling architecture provide ability for customers to interact with Alexa in a natural and conversational manner.

For example, to customize recommendations, the team found that initially customers might say, “I am in the mood for something funny”. They would then follow that by asking, “Which of these are on Prime Video?” or simply stating, “free to me”. So, the team worked to ensure WSIW could support those types of interactions with Alexa. It proved to be a feature customers responded to enthusiastically.

The team also responded to early feedback by introducing more gradual introductions to autoplay trailers and swapped an intro video on how to use the WSIW feature with on-screen contextual hints.

“Another insight was that customers wanted to be able to view only the titles they were already entitled to — versus those for rent or purchase — so we added a permanent free-to-me filter. Customers routinely call that out as a highlight,” Dutta Sharma said.

Building AI for the entertainment space

The What Should I Watch experience builds upon existing Alexa natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition capabilities.

"But bringing natural conversation to the entertainment domain has its own set of unique challenges," Laslau explained. Maybe a show, like The Boys or The Expanse, is ambiguously named, or a movie starts to trend that wasn't in the catalog a week or two ago. Optimizing the feature required combining core advances in AI around natural, multi-turn conversations with a fast-changing catalog.

"We are making sure those natural conversations are intelligent enough to reflect the very latest of what's happening in entertainment," he said.

The team also worked to ensure a mix of personalization based on your preferences— those British detective series you always gravitate toward — and something new that you might not have seen otherwise.

They did this by customizing Fire TV's existing recommender technology, mixing personalization with popular titles and randomizing subsets of these lists so that viewers encounter fresh ideas each time they turn on the TV.

A flywheel effect on innovation

The deep-learning-based Alexa Conversations makes it far simpler to develop the thousands of potential dialogue turns that a “What Should I Watch?” utterance might generate.

Alexa Conversations comprises three models: entity recognition (identifying Tom Cruise as an actor, for example), action prediction (utilizing the “movie searching” API to find movies), and argument filling (indicating the movies to be those with Tom Cruise).

“Alexa Conversations is designed to reduce the burden on developers, generating variations of dialogue automatically. The team has added several new features recently,” said Jiun-Yu Kao, an applied scientist within the Alexa AI Natural Understanding organization.

The WSIW experience is the first to launch with enhanced understanding of screen context.
Jiun-Yu Kao

Those include conversational Q&A which allow customers to ask broad questions about the recommended titles, such as which movies won an Oscar; a context reset function that allows a user to "start over" with a blank slate; and visual context, which enhances Alexa’s ability to respond correctly when a viewer says something like, "play the one on the left,” referencing what’s on the screen instead of naming the movie title.

“The WSIW experience is the first to launch with enhanced understanding of screen context,” Kao said. “It is also the first to combine all above-listed features for improved customer experience.”

Alexa and Fire TV science, engineering, and product teams collaborated to build the different components of the new feature.

Related content
A behind-the-scenes look at the unique challenges the engineering teams faced, and how they used scientific research to drive fundamental innovation to overcome those challenges.

“What’s super cool is that we are tapping into so many different services in parts of Alexa and Fire TV,” said Carlos Mattoso, a Fire TV software development engineer. “We are using a lot of the domain knowledge and capabilities that Fire TV has built around the recommendation space, for instance. But where we do that, we’re also trying to raise the bar: How can we use the information we’re gleaning from usage of What Should I Watch back into the system so that we have this flywheel that continuously improves?”

Mattoso noted that work with the Alexa team enabled not just suggestions but new in-context commands for Fire TV playback and volume changes, for example, that weren’t previously available.

“For instance, when we were building the first beta, we did not really have a way of initiating playback of a title from within an Alexa skill for Fire TV,” he explained. “So, we worked together with the Alexa Video team to extend the existing capability and then add support for that feature so that we could use it on WSIW.”

Looking ahead

Teams continue to work on making What Should I Watch faster and smarter.

One possibility is for users to explicitly guide Alexa by saying something like, "I'm a big sci-fi fan," or "I don't like horror movies." This type of interaction represents an opportunity for Alexa to adapt to customer engagement preferences, with some preferring to guide the service directly, and others wanting to lean back and take in recommendations.

As collaboration on the experience continues, both Alexa and Fire TV are becoming more capable. That could have a broader effect, particularly for the Alexa skill development community.

“We’re really trying to raise the bar,” Mattoso said, “and the capabilities we develop may eventually benefit third-party skill developers. Those might include improved long-term memory, better context resetting, and better visual context understanding.”

Research areas

Related content

US, MA, Boston
As a Principal Scientist within the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) organization, you are a trusted part of the technical leadership. 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. You solicit differing views across the organization and are willing to change your mind as you learn more. Your artifacts are exemplary and often used as reference across organization. You are a hands-on scientific leader. 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. You amplify your impact by leading scientific reviews within your organization or at your location. You scrutinize and review experimental design, modeling, verification and other research procedures. You probe assumptions, illuminate pitfalls, and foster shared understanding. You align teams toward coherent strategies. You educate, keeping the scientific community up to date on advanced techniques, state of the art approaches, the latest technologies, and trends. You help managers guide the career growth of other scientists by mentoring and play a significant role in hiring and developing scientists and leads. You will play a critical role in driving the development of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies that can handle Amazon-scale use cases and have a significant impact on our customers' experiences. Key job responsibilities You will be responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice. You will develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them. You will also participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development. You will be technically fearless and with a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions. You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope with multimodal LLMs and Gen AI in Computer Vision, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the next level. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. 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. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.
GB, Cambridge
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like Echo, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, and other consumer devices. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team to advance the state-of-the-art in developing efficient multimodal language models across our product portfolio. Through close hardware-software integration, we design and train models for resource efficiency across the hardware and software tech stack. The Silicon and Solutions Group Edge AI team is looking for a talented Sr. Applied Scientist who will lead our efforts on inventing evaluation methods for multimodal language models and agents for new devices, including audio and vision experiences. Key job responsibilities - Collaborate with cross-functional engineers and scientists to advance the state of the art in multimodal model evaluations for devices, including audio, images, and videos - Invent and validate reliability for novel automated evaluation methods for perception tasks, such as fine-tuned LLM-as-judge - Develop and extend our evaluation framework(s) to support expanding capabilities for multimodal language models - Analyze large offline and online datasets to understand model gaps, develop methods to interpret model failures, and collaborate with training teams to enhance model capabilities for product use cases - Work closely with scientists, compiler engineers, data collection, and product teams to advance evaluation methods - Mentor less experienced Applied Scientists A day in the life As a Scientist with the Silicon and Solutions Group Edge AI team, you'll contribute to innovative methods for evaluating new product experiences and discover ways to enhance our model capabilities and enrich our customer experiences. You'll research new methods for reliably assessing perception capabilities for audio-visual tasks in multimodal language models, design and implement new metrics, and develop our evaluation framework. You'll collaborate across teams of engineers and scientists to identify and root cause issues in models and their system integration to continuously enhance the end-to-end experience. About the team Our Edge AI science team brings together our unique skills and experiences to deliver state-of-the-art multimodal AI models that enable new experiences on Amazon devices. We work at the intersection of hardware, software, and science to build models designed for our custom silicon.
US, CA, Sunnyvale
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to help build industry-leading technology with generative AI (GenAI) and multi-modal systems. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to develop algorithms and modeling techniques to advance the state of the art with multi-modal systems. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of vision and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s large-scale computing resources to accelerate development with multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) and GenAI in Computer Vision. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope with multimodal LLMs and GenAI in Computer Vision, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the limits. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. As an Applied Scientist on our team, you will focus on building state-of-the-art ML models for healthcare. Our team rewards curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing products to market. Competitive candidates are responsive, flexible, and able to succeed within an open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, startup-like environment. At the forefront of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with a diverse and talented team of scientists, engineers, and product managers and collaborate with other teams. This role offers a unique opportunity to work on projects that could fundamentally transform healthcare outcomes. Key job responsibilities In this role, you will: • Design and implement novel AI/ML solutions for complex healthcare challenges • Drive advancements in machine learning and data science • Balance theoretical knowledge with practical implementation • Work closely with customers and partners to understand their requirements • Navigate ambiguity and create clarity in early-stage product development • Collaborate with cross-functional teams while fostering innovation in a collaborative work environment to deliver impactful solutions • Establish best practices for ML experimentation, evaluation, development and deployment • Partner with leadership to define roadmap and strategic initiatives You’ll need a strong background in AI/ML, proven leadership skills, and the ability to translate complex concepts into actionable plans. You’ll also need to effectively translate research findings into practical solutions. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate insights and opportunities, design simulations and 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 Special Projects organization. You will prepare written and verbal presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. About the team We represent Amazon's ambitious vision to solve the world's most pressing challenges. We are exploring new approaches to enhance research practices in the healthcare space, leveraging Amazon's scale and technological expertise. We operate with the agility of a startup while backed by Amazon's resources and operational excellence. We're looking for builders who are excited about working on ambitious, undefined problems and are comfortable with ambiguity.
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through state-of-the-art generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. The Off-Search team within Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) is focused on building delightful ad experiences across various surfaces beyond Search on Amazon—such as product detail pages, the homepage, and store-in-store pages—to drive monetization. Our vision is to deliver highly personalized, context-aware advertising that adapts to individual shopper preferences, scales across diverse page types, remains relevant to seasonal and event-driven moments, and integrates seamlessly with organic recommendations such as new arrivals, basket-building content, and fast-delivery options. To execute this vision, we work in close partnership with Amazon Stores stakeholders to lead the expansion and growth of advertising across Amazon-owned and -operated pages beyond Search. We operate full stack—from backend ads-retail edge services, ads retrieval, and ad auctions to shopper-facing experiences—all designed to deliver meaningful value. Curious about our advertising solutions? Discover more about Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to see how we’re helping businesses grow on Amazon.com and beyond! Key job responsibilities This role will be pivotal in redesigning how ads contribute to a personalized, relevant, and inspirational shopping experience, with the customer value proposition at the forefront. Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to: - Contribute to the design and development of GenAI, deep learning, multi-objective optimization and/or reinforcement learning empowered solutions to transform ad retrieval, auctions, whole-page relevance, and/or bespoke shopping experiences. - Collaborate cross-functionally with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to bring scalable, production-ready science solutions to life. - Stay abreast of industry trends in GenAI, LLMs, and related disciplines, bringing fresh and innovative concepts, ideas, and prototypes to the organization. - Contribute to the enhancement of team’s scientific and technical rigor by identifying and implementing best-in-class algorithms, methodologies, and infrastructure that enable rapid experimentation and scaling. - Mentor and grow junior scientists and engineers, cultivating a high-performing, collaborative, and intellectually curious team. A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the Sponsored Products and Brands Off-Search team, you will contribute to the development in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize our advertising flow, backend optimization, and frontend shopping experiences. This is a rare opportunity to redefine how ads are retrieved, allocated, and/or experienced—elevating them into personalized, contextually aware, and inspiring components of the customer journey. You will have the opportunity to fundamentally transform areas such as ad retrieval, ad allocation, whole-page relevance, and differentiated recommendations through the lens of GenAI. By building novel generative models grounded in both Amazon’s rich data and the world’s collective knowledge, your work will shape how customers engage with ads, discover products, and make purchasing decisions. If you are passionate about applying frontier AI to real-world problems with massive scale and impact, this is your opportunity to define the next chapter of advertising science. About the team The Off-Search team within Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) is focused on building delightful ad experiences across various surfaces beyond Search on Amazon—such as product detail pages, the homepage, and store-in-store pages—to drive monetization. Our vision is to deliver highly personalized, context-aware advertising that adapts to individual shopper preferences, scales across diverse page types, remains relevant to seasonal and event-driven moments, and integrates seamlessly with organic recommendations such as new arrivals, basket-building content, and fast-delivery options. To execute this vision, we work in close partnership with Amazon Stores stakeholders to lead the expansion and growth of advertising across Amazon-owned and -operated pages beyond Search. We operate full stack—from backend ads-retail edge services, ads retrieval, and ad auctions to shopper-facing experiences—all designed to deliver meaningful value. Curious about our advertising solutions? Discover more about Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to see how we’re helping businesses grow on Amazon.com and beyond!
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of GenAI technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in LLMs. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in GenAI with LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
GB, Cambridge
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like Echo, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, and other consumer devices. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team to advance the state-of-the-art in developing efficient multimodal language models across our product portfolio. Through close hardware-software integration, we design and train models for resource efficiency across the hardware and software tech stack. The Silicon and Solutions Group Edge AI team is looking for a talented Applied Scientist who will develop new evaluation methods for multimodal language models and agents for our devices, including audio and vision experiences. Key job responsibilities - Collaborate with cross-functional engineers and scientists to advance the state of the art in multimodal model evaluations for devices, including audio, images, and videos - Invent and validate reliability for novel automated evaluation methods for perception tasks, such as fine-tuned LLM-as-judge - Develop and extend our evaluation framework(s) to support expanding capabilities for multimodal language models - Analyze large offline and online datasets to understand model gaps, develop methods to interpret model failures, and collaborate with training teams to enhance model capabilities for product use cases - Work closely with scientists, compiler engineers, data collection, and product teams to advance evaluation methods A day in the life As a Scientist with the Silicon and Solutions Group Edge AI team, you'll contribute to innovative methods for evaluating new product experiences and discover ways to enhance our model capabilities and enrich our customer experiences. You'll have opportunities to collaborate across teams of engineers and scientists to bring algorithms and models to production. About the team Our Edge AI science team brings together our unique skills and experiences to deliver state-of-the-art multimodal AI models that enable new experiences on Amazon devices.
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through state-of-the-art generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. Curious about our advertising solutions? Discover more about Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to see how we’re helping businesses grow on Amazon.com and beyond! Key job responsibilities This role will be pivotal in redesigning how ads contribute to a personalized, relevant, and inspirational shopping experience, with the customer value proposition at the forefront. Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to: - Contribute to the design and development of GenAI, deep learning, multi-objective optimization and/or reinforcement learning empowered solutions to transform ad retrieval, auctions, whole-page relevance, and/or bespoke shopping experiences. - Collaborate cross-functionally with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to bring scalable, production-ready science solutions to life. - Stay abreast of industry trends in GenAI, LLMs, and related disciplines, bringing fresh and innovative concepts, ideas, and prototypes to the organization. - Contribute to the enhancement of team’s scientific and technical rigor by identifying and implementing best-in-class algorithms, methodologies, and infrastructure that enable rapid experimentation and scaling. - Mentor and grow junior scientists and engineers, cultivating a high-performing, collaborative, and intellectually curious team. A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the Sponsored Products and Brands Off-Search team, you will contribute to the development in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize our advertising flow, backend optimization, and frontend shopping experiences. This is a rare opportunity to redefine how ads are retrieved, allocated, and/or experienced—elevating them into personalized, contextually aware, and inspiring components of the customer journey. You will have the opportunity to fundamentally transform areas such as ad retrieval, ad allocation, whole-page relevance, and differentiated recommendations through the lens of GenAI. By building novel generative models grounded in both Amazon’s rich data and the world’s collective knowledge, your work will shape how customers engage with ads, discover products, and make purchasing decisions. If you are passionate about applying frontier AI to real-world problems with massive scale and impact, this is your opportunity to define the next chapter of advertising science. About the team The Off-Search team within Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) is focused on building delightful ad experiences across various surfaces beyond Search on Amazon—such as product detail pages, the homepage, and store-in-store pages—to drive monetization. Our vision is to deliver highly personalized, context-aware advertising that adapts to individual shopper preferences, scales across diverse page types, remains relevant to seasonal and event-driven moments, and integrates seamlessly with organic recommendations such as new arrivals, basket-building content, and fast-delivery options. To execute this vision, we work in close partnership with Amazon Stores stakeholders to lead the expansion and growth of advertising across Amazon-owned and -operated pages beyond Search. We operate full stack—from backend ads-retail edge services, ads retrieval, and ad auctions to shopper-facing experiences—all designed to deliver meaningful value.
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through state-of-the-art generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. Key job responsibilities This role will be pivotal in redesigning how ads contribute to a personalized, relevant, and inspirational shopping experience, with the customer value proposition at the forefront. Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to: - Contribute to the design and development of GenAI, deep learning, multi-objective optimization and/or reinforcement learning empowered solutions to transform ad retrieval, auctions, whole-page relevance, and/or bespoke shopping experiences. - Collaborate cross-functionally with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to bring scalable, production-ready science solutions to life. - Stay abreast of industry trends in GenAI, LLMs, and related disciplines, bringing fresh and innovative concepts, ideas, and prototypes to the organization. - Contribute to the enhancement of team’s scientific and technical rigor by identifying and implementing best-in-class algorithms, methodologies, and infrastructure that enable rapid experimentation and scaling. - Mentor and grow junior scientists and engineers, cultivating a high-performing, collaborative, and intellectually curious team. A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the Sponsored Products and Brands Off-Search team, you will contribute to the development in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize our advertising flow, backend optimization, and frontend shopping experiences. This is a rare opportunity to redefine how ads are retrieved, allocated, and/or experienced—elevating them into personalized, contextually aware, and inspiring components of the customer journey. You will have the opportunity to fundamentally transform areas such as ad retrieval, ad allocation, whole-page relevance, and differentiated recommendations through the lens of GenAI. By building novel generative models grounded in both Amazon’s rich data and the world’s collective knowledge, your work will shape how customers engage with ads, discover products, and make purchasing decisions. If you are passionate about applying frontier AI to real-world problems with massive scale and impact, this is your opportunity to define the next chapter of advertising science. About the team The Off-Search team within Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) is focused on building delightful ad experiences across various surfaces beyond Search on Amazon—such as product detail pages, the homepage, and store-in-store pages—to drive monetization. Our vision is to deliver highly personalized, context-aware advertising that adapts to individual shopper preferences, scales across diverse page types, remains relevant to seasonal and event-driven moments, and integrates seamlessly with organic recommendations such as new arrivals, basket-building content, and fast-delivery options. To execute this vision, we work in close partnership with Amazon Stores stakeholders to lead the expansion and growth of advertising across Amazon-owned and -operated pages beyond Search. We operate full stack—from backend ads-retail edge services, ads retrieval, and ad auctions to shopper-facing experiences—all designed to deliver meaningful value. Curious about our advertising solutions? Discover more about Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to see how we’re helping businesses grow on Amazon.com and beyond!