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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

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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 Credits, no 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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Sr. Comm Systems Engineer, Wireless Systems
US, TX, Austin
Amazon Leo is an initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. As a Systems Engineer, this role is primarily responsible for the design, development and integration of communication payload and customer terminal systems. The Role: Be part of the team defining the overall communication system and architecture of Amazon Leo’s broadband wireless network. This is a unique opportunity to innovate and define groundbreaking wireless technology at global scale. The team develops and designs the communication system for project Leo and analyzes its overall system level performance such as for overall throughput, latency, system availability, packet loss etc. This role in particular will be responsible for leading the effort in designing and developing advanced technology and solutions for communication system. This role will also be responsible developing advanced physical layer + protocol stacks systems as proof of concept and reference implementation to improve the performance and reliability of the LEO network. In particular this role will be responsible for using concepts from digital signal processing, information theory, wireless communications to develop novel solutions for achieving ultra-high performance LEO network. This role will also be part of a team and develop simulation tools with particular emphasis on modeling the physical layer aspects such as advanced receiver modeling and abstraction, interference cancellation techniques, FEC abstraction models etc. This role will also play a critical role in the integration and verification of various HW and SW sub-systems as a part of system integration and link bring-up and verification. Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Senior Applied Scientist, Real-Time Conversational AI , AGI
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to help drive the research and development of real-time multimodal conversational AI. You will contribute across two focus areas: advancing foundation models for speech and audio, and building the post-training systems (reward modeling, reinforcement learning) that shape natural, human-like conversational behavior. You will own a significant research area and contribute across the full model lifecycle — from pre-training and architecture design through post-training alignment and real-time deployment. You will work at the frontier of what’s possible in conversational AI, with the compute, data, and runway to pursue problems that few teams in the world have the resources to tackle. As a Senior Scientist, you will drive the technical execution of your research area, contribute to the team’s roadmap, and work closely with inference engineers to ensure your models are designed for real-time production deployment. Key job responsibilities What You’ll Do Foundation Model Scaling - Help build and train large-scale multimodal foundation models for real-time speech and audio generation, from architecture design through production-scale training - Advance the scaling and efficiency of conversational models, including the relationship between data, model size, and real-time performance - Design model architectures informed by hardware constraints and inference requirements, working with inference engineers to ensure models are servable from inception - Develop training methodologies for multimodal models that jointly process and generate speech, language, and audio in real-time streaming contexts - Contribute to the state of the art on efficient architectures and training methods for conversational AI at scale Post-Training & Reinforcement Learning - Design and build reward models and reward functions for speech systems — capturing naturalness, fluency, conversational quality, and real-time responsiveness - Develop and apply reinforcement learning methods to shape conversational behavior — teaching models natural timing, responsiveness, and fluid interaction - Build parts of the post-training pipeline from SFT through RL alignment, optimized for real-time multimodal outputs rather than text-only generation - Design evaluation frameworks that capture the quality dimensions unique to real-time conversation (latency sensitivity, audio quality, prosody, interaction naturalness) Real-Time Perception & Generation - Advance the team’s capabilities in real-time perception — the ability of the model to process incoming audio/speech while simultaneously generating responses - Develop techniques for natural interactive systems where the model handles concurrent input and output with human-like timing - Work at the intersection of model architecture and production constraints to ensure multimodal capabilities function within hard real-time latency budgets
Senior Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics
US, WA, Bellevue
Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes. If you're excited about this robotics revolution, come join Amazon's Fauna Robotics. As an Applied Scientist in this org, you'll push the state-of-the-art techniques in Robotics. You'll drive technical excellence in areas such as perception, manipulation, sim2real transfer, reinforcement learning and multi-task learning, designing novel algorithms that bridge the gap between research and real-world deployment. In this role, you will integrate hands-on technical expertise with scientific leadership, ensuring your team delivers robust solutions for dynamic real-world environments. While staying updated with the latest advancements in robotics research, you will leverage your experience and expertise to guide the team towards the most promising direction. Collaborating with a talented group of software engineers and scientists, you will bring your ideas to fruition. Deploying robots in home environments requires you to anticipate challenges not encountered in structured settings like warehouses. Additionally, consumer-grade sensors and actuators necessitate working around their limitations, requiring out-of-the-box innovative ideas. As such, you are someone who truly enjoys thinking about problems using first principles at a holistic and systems level to address the aforementioned challenges. Key job responsibilities - Lead technical initiatives in areas such as robotics foundation models, reinforcement learning and manipulation - - Design experiments to identify the limitations of current state-of-the-art models and developing new models or techniques that can surpass these models - Design and implement novel deep learning architectures that push the boundaries of what robots can understand and accomplish - Mentor fellow scientists while maintaining strong individual technical contributions - Collaborate with engineering teams to optimize and scale models for real-world applications - Influence technical decisions and implementation strategies within your area of focus - Experienced in communicating complex technical work to a non-technical audience - The ability to work with minimal guidance, be proactive and to handle ambiguity and the challenge of quickly evolving goals A day in the life - Train ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, identify and document their limitations post-deployment - Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders to develop innovative solutions to address identified limitations - Guide fellow scientists in solving complex technical challenges, from sim2real transfer to training RL policies - Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions 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.
Principal Applied Scientist, Ads Optimization, FAIM
US, CA, Palo Alto
As a Principal Applied Scientist for Full-Funnel Campaign optimization, you will invent the models that jointly allocate budget across sponsored ad products to maximize advertiser outcomes and long-term customer value. This is a rare charter to build foundational optimization science where little exists today, spanning campaign recommendation, cross-product budget allocation, incrementality measurement, and long-term-sales modeling. You will set technical direction for a growing team, partner with engineering and product to take models from research to production at Amazon scale, and directly move advertiser ROAS and new-to-brand growth. - Own the science vision for full-funnel campaign optimization end to end - Invent models for joint budget allocation, incrementality, and long-term value - Take innovations from prototype to production serving live advertiser campaigns - Raise the technical bar across scientists and engineers Key job responsibilities - Define the long-term scientific vision for full-funnel campaign optimization, translating ambiguous advertiser needs and competing objectives into a concrete science roadmap. - Invent, prototype, and productionize machine learning and optimization solutions for joint budget allocation across sponsored ad products, spanning the shopper journey from awareness to purchase. - Develop rigorous approaches to incrementality measurement and long-term-sales modeling that ground optimization in true advertiser value. - Design and lead large-scale experiments and analyses to validate hypotheses and guide product direction. - Partner closely with engineering and product to define technical contracts, data schemas, and serving systems that carry models into production. - Raise the technical bar across science and engineering through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration. - Grow scientific talent and publish impactful research internally and at top-tier venues. A day in the life You move between deep technical work and org-wide influence. A morning might be spent deriving a budget-allocation formulation with two scientists, then reviewing an incrementality experiment design over an advertiser segment. Afternoons bring roadmap alignment with product and engineering partners, a design review that raises the bar on a teammate's model, and a working session on taking a prototype to production. Your customers are Amazon advertisers and their shoppers; your stakeholders span applied science, engineering, and product leadership across the Ads full-funnel organization. About the team We build the optimization science behind full-funnel advertising on Amazon: how campaigns are recommended, and how budget is allocated across sponsored ad products to grow advertiser outcomes and long-term customer value. Our mission is to make full-funnel advertising work automatically and measurably for every advertiser, from foundational research through production systems serving live campaigns. We are a science-driven, high-ownership team that values rigorous experimentation, invention where no proven approach exists yet, and close partnership with engineering and product.
Sr. Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Personalization and Discovery Science
US, WA, Seattle
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! We are looking for a self-motivated, passionate and resourceful Applied Scientist to bring diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. You will spend your time as a hands-on machine learning practitioner and a research leader. You will play a key role on the team, building and guiding machine learning models from the ground up. At the end of the day, you will have the reward of seeing your contributions benefit millions of Amazon.com customers worldwide. Key job responsibilities - Develop AI solutions for various Prime Video Search systems using Deep learning, GenAI, Reinforcement Learning, and optimization methods; - Work closely with engineers and product managers to design, implement and launch AI solutions end-to-end; - Design and conduct offline and online (A/B) experiments to evaluate proposed solutions based on in-depth data analyses; - Effectively communicate technical and non-technical ideas with teammates and stakeholders; - Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in the field; - Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals. About the team Our team works at the intersection of generative recommendations, multi-objective reinforcement learning, and whole-page optimization. We're rethinking how recommendation systems construct experiences end-to-end, moving beyond ranked lists toward intelligent, adaptive page-level decision-making at scale.
Senior Applied Scientist, Special Projects
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 a Senior 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.
Research Scientist II, Special Projects
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 extreme. 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.
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