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Foundation Model Development call for proposals — Winter 2024

Advancing the frontiers of foundation model development.

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About this CFP

AWS offers a broad and deep set of services for organizations to create meaningful machine learning solutions faster. Our mission is to share our learnings and ML capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every scientist and developer.

AWS is soliciting funding proposals related to foundation model (FM) development, including enhancements for dialogue, factual questioning and answering, text generation, document summarization, image generation, and more. Proposals should be expanding the state of the art in terms of training methods, with a focus on one of the following areas: 1) to reduce incorrect or nonsensical answers, 2) to reduce the sensitivity to tweaks to the input prompt, 3) ask clarifying questions when facing ambiguous questions, 4) develop efficiency enhancements across the training and hosting FM lifecycle.

We are inviting work that both critiques and enhances the state-of-the-art in FM, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Reinforcement learning with human feedback
  • Scaling laws and their inverse, including for model fine-tuning
  • Novel datasets and training methods
  • Distillation with enhanced reasoning
  • Foundation models in novel modalities and domains, such as biology, manufacturing, fashion, etc.
  • Bias detection and mitigation throughout the foundation model lifecycle

AWS aims to advance foundation model development by funding the creation of open-source artifacts, datasets and code that benefit the research community at large, or impactful research that uses machine learning tools. AWS will provide credits for use on EC2 instances powered by AWS Trainium chips to help researchers develop and test solutions at scale. In addition to AWS Trainium, proposed research can be conducted using AWS AI Services, AWS ML Services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, Amazon SageMaker Neo, and Amazon Augmented AI), and Amazon Bedrock.

Timeline

  • Submission period: January 17 - March 6, 2024 (11:59PM Pacific Time)
  • Decision letters will be sent out in October 2024

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • $250,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, which can be used on generally available EC2 instances that are powered by AWS Trainium chips
  • AWS Trainium 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.

Your receipt and use of AWS Promotional Credits is governed by the AWS Promotional Credit Terms and Conditions, which may be updated by AWS from time to time.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the Rules and Eligibility page.

Proposal requirements

PIs are encouraged to exemplify how their proposed techniques or research studies expand the body of knowledge on pretraining and evaluation methods. 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. Proposals for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 5 pages, not including Appendices.

Selection criteria

Funding decisions are based on the creativity and quality of the scientific content, and potential impact to the research community and society at large. AWS may solicit feedback on proposal title and abstracts from select AWS customers, but final award decisions will be made solely by AWS. Proposals will be evaluated based on their express interest in open-sourcing their model artifacts, datasets, and development frameworks. Although usage of Trainium is not a requirement, proposals will be evaluated on their intention to use and explore novel hardware for AI/ML, such as Trainium.

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 engage with AWS throughout the duration of their award year including, but not limited to, providing reports on the status of their research or updates and feedback to ARA via surveys. Award recipients will have the 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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Applied Scientist II, Amazon Search
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Search is reinventing how customers find products through natural-language and semantic understanding. We are looking for an Applied Scientist II to push the science behind Natural Language Search that interprets complex, constraint-rich shopping queries, retrieves and ranks the most relevant products. You will build and ship large-scale relevance and ranking models that measurably reduce the rate at which customers see irrelevant results, working on problems that span query understanding, semantic matching, and contextual ranking at Amazon scale. Key job responsibilities - Design, train, and ship deep-learning ranking and semantic-matching models that improve search relevance and reduce how often customers see irrelevant results, across hard query types. - Build the training data and evaluation methods that make these models work: synthetic and historical labels, hard-negative mining, and targeted sampling at the cases where search fails. - Develop signals that match product attributes to what the customer actually asked for. - Run offline and online A/B experiments, analyze precision/recall tradeoffs, and iterate to launch. - Work with engineers and scientists across teams to take models from prototype to production at Amazon scale. A day in the life You work alongside scientists and engineers on some of the hardest open problems in search relevance, teaching models to understand what customers really mean when they ask for something specific and nuanced. A typical day blends model development and data curation with sharp experiment analysis: diagnosing where search breaks down for a query segment, designing the fix, and proving the gains through offline metrics and live A/B tests that reach real Amazon customers. The work spans the full range, from surgical fixes that resolve stubborn failure pattern to broad modeling changes that move relevance for millions of queries at once. You'll see your ideas go from whiteboard to production fast, present results regularly to wider team, and help shape the team's relevance roadmap worldwide. About the team We are the science team behind Amazon's semantic search relevance and ranking. We own the models that understand nuanced, multi-constraint shopping queries and show products customers actually want. We operate close to production, measure ourselves on real customer-impact metrics, and run a culture of fast, rigorous experimentation. Every model decision is grounded in data.
Economist I, Prime Video
US, CA, Culver City
Prime Video is an industry leading, high-growth business and a critical driver of Amazon Prime subscriptions, which contributes to customer loyalty and lifetime value. Prime Video is a digital video streaming and download service that offers Amazon customers the ability to rent, purchase or subscribe to a huge catalog of videos. In addition, Prime Video offers a variety of live sport streaming services in multiple locales. The Prime Video Economist team is looking for an Economist to support PV content valuation. As an economist focusing on Prime Video, you will be responsible for understanding the value that the business creates for our customers and to develop new, disruptive innovations to grow global Prime Video usage and customer value. This role requires an individual with strong quantitative modeling skills and the ability to apply statistical/machine learning, structural models, and experimental design methods to large amount of individual level data. The candidate should have strong communication skills, be able to work closely with stakeholders and translate data-driven findings into actionable insights. The successful candidate will be a self-starter comfortable with ambiguity, with strong attention to detail and ability to work in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment. Key job responsibilities The candidate's responsibilities will include: - Build scalable analytic solutions using state of the art tools based on large datasets - Build causal inference models, conduct statistical/machine learning analyses, or design experiments to measure the value of the business and its many features - Partner closely with Business, Finance, Science, and Tech partners to build prototypes and implement production solutions - Independently identify new opportunities for leveraging economic insights and models in the Video business - Develop and execute product workplans from concept, prototype to production incorporating feedback from customers, scientists and business leaders - Write both technical white papers and business-facing documents to clearly explain complex technical concepts to audiences with diverse business/scientific backgrounds
Sr Applied Scientist, Applied AI Solutions
US, WA, Seattle
About us As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, our vision is 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. Our team combines Amazon's real-world experience with state-of-art AI to create opinionated, turnkey solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. We're building applied AI solutions that businesses love and trust. Our ambition is to become the partner companies rely on to run their business every day—putting AI to work to deliver better customer experiences, operational excellence, and faster innovation. We're a fast-moving, scrappy team building a new agentic product from the ground up. If bias for action is your favorite leadership principle, you'll fit right in. The Role We're seeking a talented Senior Applied Scientist with expertise in large language models, agentic systems, and foundational models. You will be responsible for building the state-of-art multi-agent system, using a handful of methods including fine-tunning, reinforcement learning, etc. You'll accelerate our customer-facing features, contribute to our collaborative and innovative culture, and bring state-of-art applied research that raises the bar for the entire team. Key job responsibilities • Drive end-to-end GenAI projects with high complexity and ambiguity from conception to production • Build, optimize, and deploy ML models while collaborating with software engineers for productionization • Research innovative machine learning approaches and identify new opportunities for GenAI applications • Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of large datasets to develop actionable insights • Establish scalable, automated processes for data analysis, model development, and validation • Present results to senior leadership and collaborate with cross-functional teams About the team 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.
Principal Applied Scientist, Personalization
US, WA, Seattle
Reinventing How the World Shops! We are building the future of human-AI collaboration in commerce. We are creating an AI-native shopping partner that truly understands what customers mean, what they need, and what they haven't yet realized they want—rivaling the intuition of the best human experts, operating at a scale no human ever could. This is a complex personalization challenge. We sit at the intersection of massive-scale language understanding, real-time decision systems, hundreds of millions of customers, and billions of products. Our mission is to collapse the distance between intent and discovery—to make the leap from "searching for products" to "being understood as a person." As a Principal Applied Scientist, you will be the intellectual engine behind this transformation. You will define the frontier, architect the science strategy for a large, multidisciplinary organization, and drive breakthroughs that reshape how Amazon thinks about customers and products at the deepest level. The problems you'll solve don't have textbook answers. You will pioneer next-generation LLM-based reasoning systems that build rich, evolving models of customer intent. You will design transformer architectures that abstract noisy behavioral signals into high-quality latent representations of human preference. You will invent real-time, multi-objective ranking systems that balance exploration, personalization, and serendipity at billions of decisions per day. And you will do all of this as a force multiplier, building foundational technology that empowers teams across Amazon to deliver experiences that feel almost magical. Your work will be felt, not just measured. Every model you build ships directly to hundreds of millions of customers. The feedback loop between your science and real human delight is immediate. This role offers a rare combination of intellectual depth, technical ambition, and tangible impact. Come define what shopping looks like in the age of AI! Key job responsibilities - Innovate new features and models that have huge impact on the customer experience. Help customers find the right products and content on their shopping journey. - Leverage the use of advanced machine learning to create customer shopping experience at Amazon's scale - for all Amazon customers across all countries in realtime - Be a key leader on a multidisciplinary team across science, product, design, and engineering to see through ideas from inception, prototype, to launch in the hands of all Amazon's customers - Drive the science roadmap across multiple teams, helping coordinate a cohesive science agenda across the org. - Mentoring applied scientists across the org, growing their skills and careers. About the team Our mission is to delight every Amazon customer with a personalized shopping experience tailed to their intent. We achieve our mission through investments in Science, UX, and central systems with the purpose of delivering the future of shopping on Amazon. We are seeking a Principal Applied Scientist to lead the science charter across the recommendations and intent identification space.
Applied Scientist II, Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience (GRAISE)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
We are looking for a talented Applied Scientist to join our team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy machine learning and computer vision models that solve real-world problems at scale in the Amazon grocery domain. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to turn complex technical challenges into production-ready solutions, and own the model development lifecycle from experimentation through deployment. You will bring scientific rigor to every stage — from data analysis and model design to evaluation and iteration. This is a high-impact role where your models will directly improve the shopping experience for millions of customers in Amazon grocery stores. Key job responsibilities Design, train, and evaluate computer vision and machine learning models for complex grocery-domain problems including product identification, shelf perception, and in-store scene understanding — iterating rapidly from prototype to production-quality solutions Conduct rigorous exploratory data analysis to characterize domain-specific challenges (image variability, catalog gaps, label noise) and translate findings into actionable modeling decisions Own the model development lifecycle from experimentation through deployment — collaborating with software and ML engineers to ensure models meet latency, throughput, and reliability requirements at production scale Design and execute offline and online evaluation frameworks — defining metrics that capture both model performance and downstream business impact, and diagnosing failure modes to prioritize improvements Build and improve data pipelines and annotation workflows that feed model training, including active learning strategies to maximize label efficiency Communicate technical results, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly to engineering, product, and business stakeholders — connecting model behavior to customer experience outcomes Stay current with state-of-the-art research in computer vision, multimodal learning, and representation learning — evaluating and adapting promising techniques to team-specific problems Contribute to a culture of scientific rigor through reproducible experimentation, thorough documentation, peer code and design reviews, and raising the quality bar for the team A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the GRAISE team, you'll spend your days analyzing model performance from overnight experiments, collaborating with engineers to deploy computer vision models to production, and prototyping new approaches using multimodal learning with store video and sensor data. You'll present findings to product and business stakeholders, translating technical results into actionable recommendations. Throughout the day, you'll balance rigorous scientific thinking with practical engineering constraints, knowing your work directly improves the shopping experience for millions of customers in Amazon grocery stores. About the team The GRAISE team (Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience) within World Wide Grocery Store Tech (WWGST) builds foundational AI and machine learning systems that power Amazon's in-store grocery technologies. We develop domain-specific models that solve uniquely complex challenges in grocery — from smart shopping carts and inventory intelligence to personalization and store operations. Our mission is to create technology which makes grocery shopping more convenient, economical, personalized, and enjoyable for customers while empowering retailers with operational efficiency
Sr. Applied Scientist , Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience (GRAISE)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist who will own the science strategy and technical direction for computer vision and machine learning within the Amazon grocery ecosystem. You will identify the highest-impact problems in ambiguous, rapidly evolving domains, frame them rigorously, and drive solutions from research through production at scale. You will lead cross-functional technical decisions with engineering, product, and business partners, shaping not just what we build but also how we invest. This is a role where your scientific judgment, architectural choices, and ability to create clarity from ambiguity will directly define the intelligence layer powering millions of grocery shopping experiences. Key job responsibilities * Own the end-to-end science strategy for computer vision and machine learning solutions in the grocery domain, navigating ambiguity to identify the highest-impact opportunities * Develop novel approaches to complex, unsolved perception and identification challenges where off-the-shelf methods are insufficient; publish findings internally or externally to advance the state of the art * Define the evaluation framework and success criteria for model performance, establishing metrics that connect scientific outcomes to measurable business impact and using these to influence roadmap prioritization * Lead cross-functional technical design with engineering, product, and operations partners, driving architecture decisions for model serving, data pipelines, and system reliability at scale rather than solely handing off models for productionization * Identify and resolve ambiguous, cross-team technical dependencies (e.g., upstream data quality, annotation infrastructure, model interoperability) that block progress across multiple workstreams; propose and drive solutions proactively * Influence technical direction beyond the immediate team mentor scientists, raise the bar in hiring, establish best practices for experimentation and model development, and represent the team's science strategy to senior leadership * Communicate complex technical trade-offs and recommendations to VP-level stakeholders, shaping investment decisions and aligning cross-org partners on science-informed product direction A day in the life As a Senior Applied Scientist on the GRAISE team, you'll own the technical strategy for how computer vision and multimodal learning come together to solve perception problems in grocery stores — many of which no one has cleanly formulated yet. On any given day, you might diagnose a surprising failure mode from overnight experiments and decide whether to pivot your approach entirely, co-architect a serving system with engineers while defining confidence thresholds and graceful degradation paths, present a precision-recall trade-off to senior leaders in terms that shape launch decisions and investment priorities, or unblock a cross-team dependency on annotation infrastructure — all while mentoring junior scientists and carving out time for deep technical work on problems the team hasn't cracked. Your scientific judgment and architectural choices will directly shape the shopping experience for millions of customers across Amazon's grocery stores. About the team The GRAISE team (Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience) within World Wide Grocery Store Tech (WWGST) builds foundational AI and machine learning systems that power Amazon's in-store grocery technologies. We develop domain-specific models that solve uniquely complex challenges in grocery — from smart shopping carts and inventory intelligence to personalization and store operations. Our mission is to create technology which makes grocery shopping more convenient, economical, personalized, and enjoyable for customers while empowering retailers with operational efficiency
Applied Scientist II, Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience (GRAISE)
IN, KA, Bengaluru
We are looking for a talented Applied Scientist to join our team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy machine learning and computer vision models that solve real-world problems at scale in the Amazon grocery domain. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business teams to turn complex technical challenges into production-ready solutions, and own the model development lifecycle from experimentation through deployment. You will bring scientific rigor to every stage — from data analysis and model design to evaluation and iteration. This is a high-impact role where your models will directly improve the shopping experience for millions of customers in Amazon grocery stores. Key job responsibilities Design, train, and evaluate computer vision and machine learning models for complex grocery-domain problems including product identification, shelf perception, and in-store scene understanding — iterating rapidly from prototype to production-quality solutions Conduct rigorous exploratory data analysis to characterize domain-specific challenges (image variability, catalog gaps, label noise) and translate findings into actionable modeling decisions Own the model development lifecycle from experimentation through deployment — collaborating with software and ML engineers to ensure models meet latency, throughput, and reliability requirements at production scale Design and execute offline and online evaluation frameworks — defining metrics that capture both model performance and downstream business impact, and diagnosing failure modes to prioritize improvements Build and improve data pipelines and annotation workflows that feed model training, including active learning strategies to maximize label efficiency Communicate technical results, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly to engineering, product, and business stakeholders — connecting model behavior to customer experience outcomes Stay current with state-of-the-art research in computer vision, multimodal learning, and representation learning — evaluating and adapting promising techniques to team-specific problems Contribute to a culture of scientific rigor through reproducible experimentation, thorough documentation, peer code and design reviews, and raising the quality bar for the team A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the GRAISE team, you'll spend your days analyzing model performance from overnight experiments, collaborating with engineers to deploy computer vision models to production, and prototyping new approaches using multimodal learning with store video and sensor data. You'll present findings to product and business stakeholders, translating technical results into actionable recommendations. Throughout the day, you'll balance rigorous scientific thinking with practical engineering constraints, knowing your work directly improves the shopping experience for millions of customers in Amazon grocery stores. About the team The GRAISE team (Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience) within World Wide Grocery Store Tech (WWGST) builds foundational AI and machine learning systems that power Amazon's in-store grocery technologies. We develop domain-specific models that solve uniquely complex challenges in grocery — from smart shopping carts and inventory intelligence to personalization and store operations. Our mission is to create technology which makes grocery shopping more convenient, economical, personalized, and enjoyable for customers while empowering retailers with operational efficiency
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