Amazon Science Community and Machine Learning University call for proposals - Spring 2022

Making Amazon the best place in the world to do customer-obsessed science and engineering

About this CFP

The Amazon Science Community and Machine Learning University teams are committed to making Amazon the best place in the world to do customer-obsessed science and engineering. Our programs, including onboarding bootcamps, mentorship programs, and instructor-led classes, help Amazon’s scientists and engineers do their best work. We aim to advance the state of the art in the design and execution of these programs. We are seeking to fund economics and social science research on the following topics:

  • Scientific productivity metrics – high quality science can take years to develop and have a customer impact; how can we know in the meantime if a research team is flourishing or floundering?
  • Scientific impact metrics – scientific work not only operates on long timelines, it has a cumulative effect.  One research paper may not get turned into a product or service, but it can serve as critical inspiration for the next research paper that does.  How can we assess the impact of a given research project, team, or individual, beyond basic tools like citation and patent metrics?
  • Team-based research success factors – impactful science is increasingly done by teams; research teams to create the science, and engineering teams to implement scientific solutions on behalf of customers.  What are the most critical factors that cause a team to have scientific success, and what mechanisms can influence them?
  • Individual-based research success factors – what are the key factors to individual scientific success, and which of these are a product of the institutional environment?  How can we optimize the physical and social environment to allow scientists to do their best work?
  • Educational design – what drives success in technical courses when presented in-person, live remote, or self-paced?  What drives students to choose one option or the other, and how can we leverage hybrid formats to bring together the strengths of each of these?  What are the data-driven best practices for online education, particularly with regards to recent shifts in working practices?  How do we measure practical success when teaching scientific knowledge at scale?

Timeline

Submission period: June 3 - July 8, 2022

Decision letters will be sent out December 2022

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD
  • AWS Promotional Creditsno more than $20,000 USD
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the FAQ page.

Proposal requirements

Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template.

PIs should either include plans for open source contributions or state that they do not plan to make any open source contributions (data or code) under the proposed effort.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community and quality of the scientific content.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

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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, CA, Palo Alto
The Amazon Search team creates customer-focused search solutions and technologies. Whenever a customer visits an Amazon site worldwide and types in a query or browses through product categories, Amazon Product Search services go to work. We design, develop, and deploy high-performance distributed search systems that rank a catalog of billions of products for hundreds of millions of shoppers. The Search Relevance team owns the ranking models that decide the order of results on every Amazon search page. In this role, you will design and post-train deep ranking models, including LLM-based rankers and multi-tower deep learning models, that jointly optimize purchase, relevance, and personalization. You will invent modeling and training techniques that push the Pareto frontier across multiple objectives, and take your work end to end from novel research prototype through offline evaluation to production online experimentation. Personalization is a first-class objective on this team. You will build models that reason over each customer's history, durable preferences, and query intent to decide which results best fit that specific customer, rather than optimizing a single population-level ranking. We treat search as an active research frontier and invest heavily in staying at the leading edge of ML. Beyond today's ranking stack, our current explorations include LLM agents that reason and plan across multi-step workflows, tool-augmented foundation models, and new paradigms that combine retrieval, reasoning, and personalization. You will help chart where search goes next, and see your ideas ship to real customers within weeks, not quarters. You will work in a dynamic, entrepreneurial team while leveraging the resources of Amazon.com, one of the world's leading technology companies. Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information. Key job responsibilities Your responsibilities include but are not limited to: - Design, train, and deploy state-of-the-art ranking models that decide how results are ordered on Amazon search, spanning LLM-based rankers and multi-tower deep learning architectures that jointly model engagement, relevance, and personalization. - Post-train LLMs and ranking models with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning (e.g. GRPO, DPO, RLHF), knowledge distillation, and listwise ranking losses (e.g. LambdaLoss, ListNet, ListMLE). - Compose multiple objectives (engagement, relevance, personalization) into a single ranking through principled multi-objective optimization at inference. - Design large-scale label pipelines, including LLM-as-teacher supervision, that turn customer signals and expert judgment into training and reward signals. - Optimize inference for production ranking models through quantization, quantization-aware training, teacher-student distillation, and serving-stack tuning. - Evaluate proposed solutions through offline benchmarks and online A/B tests, and drive the analysis that decides whether a change ships. - Publish and present your work at internal and external scientific venues in ML, NLP, and IR.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon Devices is an inventive research and development company that designs and engineer high-profile devices like the Kindle family of products, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Health Wellness, Amazon Echo & Astro products. This is an exciting opportunity to join Amazon in developing state-of-the-art techniques that bring Gen AI on edge for our consumer products. We are looking for exceptional scientists to join our Applied Science team and help develop the next generation of edge models, and optimize them while doing co-designed with custom ML HW based on a revolutionary architecture. Work hard. Have Fun. Make History. Key job responsibilities What will you do? - Quantize, prune, distill, finetune Gen AI models to optimize for edge platforms - Fundamentally understand Amazon’s underlying Neural Edge Engine to invent optimization techniques - Analyze deep learning workloads and provide guidance to map them to Amazon’s Neural Edge Engine - Use first principles of Information Theory, Scientific Computing, Deep Learning Theory, Non Equilibrium Thermodynamics - Train custom Gen AI models that beat SOTA and paves path for developing production models - Collaborate closely with compiler engineers, fellow Applied Scientists, Hardware Architects and product teams to build the best ML-centric solutions for our devices - Publish in open source and present on Amazon's behalf at key ML conferences - NeurIPS, ICLR, MLSys.
US, MA, Boston
Are you excited about applying machine learning and applied mathematics to real-world systems at massive scale? As an Applied Scientist on this newly formed team, you will collaborate closely with scientists and engineers to bring research into production across a broad portfolio of problems — from computer vision perception platforms to building-wide optimization and orchestration. You will frame ambiguous business problems as tractable scientific challenges and implement novel machine learning (ML) systems, first-principles models, embedded systems prototypes, and performance optimizations in both prototype and production environments. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape the scientific direction of a new organization, where your contributions will directly influence how Amazon's fulfillment network operates and evolves. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy ML and scientific solutions spanning classical machine learning, statistical modeling, computer vision, optimization, and physics-informed modeling in production environments. - Rapidly ramp on unfamiliar problem domains, frame ambiguous business problems as tractable scientific challenges, and prototype solutions end to end. - Author or co-author research findings for internal or external peer-reviewed venues, and provide peer feedback on research procedures and results across teams. - Prototype and evaluate sensing hardware and lightweight, edge-deployable models that run on commodity compute under real-world constraints. - Collaborate across multiple science and engineering teams to integrate your solutions into deployment architecture, mentoring less experienced scientists along the way. A day in the life You might start your morning reviewing experiment results from an overnight model training run, then shift into a design discussion with engineers on how to deploy a new computer vision model to edge hardware in a fulfillment center. After lunch, you could be prototyping a physics-informed optimization approach, writing up findings for a research paper, or pairing with a teammate to debug a tricky data pipeline. As part of a new and growing organization, you will have a direct hand in shaping team practices, scientific roadmaps, and the tools you use every day. About the team Our team sits within Amazon's fulfillment technology organization and applies a range of scientific disciplines — including computer vision, optimization, reinforcement learning, and statistical modeling — to improve how goods move through Amazon's global fulfillment network. We build the models and systems that drive real-time orchestration, optimizing throughput, flow, and operational performance at scale. As a newly formed organization, we are building our culture and scientific agenda from the ground up. You will join a collaborative, inclusive group of scientists and engineers who value experimentation, rigorous research, and delivering measurable impact for customers.
CN, 31, Shanghai
Team & Project Overview The NBS Data Central team powers analytics, data science, and AI capabilities for Worldwide Global Selling (WWGS). We build scalable data products, and insight-generation systems that drive seller growth across 10+ marketplaces. Seller Intelligence is a P0 foundation theme at the Global Selling level, formed by merging "One Tagging" and "Good Contact" workstreams. It provides seller identity, segmentation, and contact-reach infrastructure that underpins all downstream seller-facing AI workflows — including intelligent outreach, personalized recommendations, and automated engagement. Scope of Impact Own the science pillar for Seller Intelligence within a cross-functional POD (PM + DE + DS + SDE) Directly impact seller engagement metrics across CN, IN, LATAM, and East-Asia expansion regions Models and data products consumed by 5+ downstream teams (ESM, NSR, MKT, NBS AI Ops, ROC) Influence $100M+ annual seller GMS through improved segmentation and contact optimization Key job responsibilities Design and deliver seller segmentation and propensity models at scale — incorporating GMS, category, growth trajectory, engagement signals, and lifecycle stage. Build contact quality scoring and lifecycle management systems (coverage optimization, dormancy detection, reactivation modeling). Define success metrics, experimentation frameworks (A/B, causal inference), and measurement methodology for seller engagement interventions. Productionize ML models and data products — partner with engineering to deploy seller scores, contact quality indices, and recommendation signals. Explore LLM/GenAI applications: automated insight generation from seller data, contact intent classification, and intelligent report synthesis. Serve as the science representative in bi-weekly NBS theme reviews; present findings and proposals to theme Bar Raisers and leadership. Collaborate with BIE team members to democratize analytical outputs via dashboards and self-serve tools. Contribute to cross-marketplace seller behavior analysis supporting Global Expansion strategy (IN, KR, VN, LATAM). Evaluate, integrate, and iterate on AI systems — assess new AI/ML tools, frameworks, and third-party models for applicability to seller intelligence use cases.
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Amazon Research Awards

Collaborating with scientists around the world to fund research, share knowledge and encourage innovation.