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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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Senior Applied Scientist, AWS Billing
US, WA, Seattle
AWS Billing requires a Scientist with a proven track record in time-series based anomaly detection. During the billing process there are many unknown-unknowns and detecting these are vital for ensuring an accurate bill. Key job responsibilities You will work closely with the usage metering and bill computation teams to build anomaly detectors that can find issues in usage and invoices. You will build production models that will be the cornerstone of our efforts to ensure accurate bills. About the team We are a small science team that work on high-impact projects in AWS Billing. Our work is foundational for Billing's accuracy goals. We publish our results in top conferences and play an active role in academia.
Senior Applied Scientist - Optimization, Fulfillment Planning and Execution Science - Fulfillment Optimization
US, WA, Bellevue
Have you ever wondered how Amazon predicts when your order will arrive and how we ensure that it actually arrives on at the promised date/time? Have you wondered where all those Amazon semi-trucks on the road are headed? Are you passionate about increasing efficiency and reducing carbon footprint? Does the idea of having worldwide impact on Amazon's logistics network including our planes, trucks, and vans sound exciting to you? If so, then we want to talk with you! At Amazon's Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT), we are tasked with optimizing the fulfilment on customer orders so that we fulfil all orders worldwide in the most intelligent manner while ensuring Amazon customers get their orders on time. Amazon Fulfillment Planning & Execution (FPX) Science team within SCOT- Fulfilment Optimization group is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist with expertise in Optimization and a proven record of solving business problems through scalable Optimization solutions. FPX Science tackles some of the most mathematically complex challenges in transportation planning and execution space to improve Amazon's operational efficiency worldwide. We own Amazon’s global fulfilment planning and execution. The team also owns the short and mid-term-term network planning and execution that determines the optimal flow of customer orders through Amazon fulfilment network. This includes developing sophisticated math models that assign orders to fulfilment centres to be picked and packed and then planning the optimal ship method in terms of cost, speed and carbon impact to deliver to the customer. These plans drive downstream decisions that are in the billions of dollars at Amazon Scale worldwide! The systems we build are entirely in-house, and are on the forefront of both academic and applied research in large scale supply chain planning, optimization, machine learning and statistics. These systems operate at various scales, from real-time decision system that completes thousands of transactions per seconds, to large scale distributed system that optimize Amazon’s fulfilment network. Your tech solution will have large impacts to the physical supply chain of Amazon, and play a key role in improving Amazon consumer business’s long-term profitability. If you are interested in diving into a multi-discipline, high impact space this is the team for you. We’re looking for a passionate, results-oriented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist who can create and improve optimization models for our outbound transportation planning and execution systems. In addition, you will be working on design, development and evaluation of highly innovative Optimization models for solving complex business problems in the area of outbound transportation planning systems. Watch http://bit.ly/amazon-scot to get the big picture. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will propose and deploy solutions that will likely draw from a range of scientific areas such as Optimization, machine learning, advanced statistical modeling, and graph models. You will be on the forefront of supply chain thought leadership by working on some of the most difficult problems in the industry, with some of the best product managers, research scientists, statisticians, and software engineers to integrate scientific work into production systems. You will bring deep technical expertise in the area of Mathematical Optimization, and play an integral part in building Amazon's Fulfillment Optimization systems. Other responsibilities include: * Design, development and evaluation of highly innovative Math models for solving complex business problems. * Research and apply the latest Optimization techniques and best practices from both academia and industry. * Think about customers and how to improve the customer delivery experience. * Use and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems. * Work closely with software engineering teams to build model implementations and integrate successful models and algorithms in production systems at very large scale. * Technically lead and mentor other scientists in team. * Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation. A day in the life This is a great role for someone who likes to learn new things. You will have the opportunity to learn all about how Amazon plans for and executes within its logistics network including Fulfillment Centres, Air Stations, Sort Centres, Delivery Stations, and more. You will need to meet with many internal customers to understand their business and their challenges as you develop an effective solution to enable us to collectively scale. Our leadership is very interested in this effort so you will find lots of opportunities to get your ideas and plans in front of them for evaluation and alignment. We are seeking someone who wants to lead projects that require innovative thinking and deep technical problem-solving skills to create production-ready mathematical optimization solutions. A successful candidate is able to quickly approach large ambiguous problems, turn high-level business requirements into mathematical models, identify the right solution approach, and contribute to the software development for production systems. Successful candidates must thrive in fast-paced environments, which encourage collaborative and creative problem solving, be able to measure and estimate risks, constructively critique peer research, and align research focuses with the Amazon's strategic needs. We look for individuals who know how to deliver results and show a desire to develop themselves, their colleagues, and their career. About the team Fulfillment Planning & Execution Science team contains a group of scientists with different technical backgrounds including Operations Research and Machine Learning who will collaborate closely with you on your projects. Our team directly supports critical functional areas across Fulfillment Optimization and the research needs of the corresponding product and engineering teams. We tackle some of the most mathematically complex challenges in facility and transportation planning and execution to improve Amazon's operational efficiency worldwide and at a scale that is unique to Amazon. We often seek the opportunity of applying hybrid techniques in the space of Operations Research and Machine Learning to tackle some of our biggest technical challenges. We disambiguate complex supply chain problems and create solutions to solve those problems at scale.
Applied Scientist II, Amazon Supply Chain
US, WA, Seattle
As part of the AWS Applied AI Solutions organization, we have a vision to provide business applications, leveraging Amazon's unique experience and expertise, that are used by millions of companies worldwide to manage day-to-day operations. We will accomplish this by accelerating our customers' businesses through delivery of intuitive and differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring business challenges. We blend vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions. Where customers prefer to buy over build, we become their trusted partner with solutions that are no-brainers to buy and easy to use. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to join our team that is building enterprise applications leveraging machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI to help millions of companies worldwide manage their day-to-day supply chain operations. Our mission is to accelerate our customers' businesses through intuitive, differentiated technology solutions that solve enduring supply chain challenges. We blend strategic vision with curiosity and Amazon's real-world operational experience to build opinionated, turnkey solutions that make the 'buy versus build' decision a no-brainer for our customers. As an Applied Scientist, you will design and develop machine learning models and algorithms that power intelligent supply chain applications at global scale. You will work at the intersection of research and real-world product impact, translating scientific advances into production systems that serve millions of customers. We operate like a startup within AWS, offering you the opportunity to tackle complex challenges while working with the latest technologies in deep learning, large language models, and optimization. If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of applied science, thrive in ambiguous problem spaces, and want to shape the future of supply chain intelligence while having the backing of AWS's extensive resources, we want to hear from you. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models for demand forecasting, inventory optimization, anomaly detection, and supply chain decision-making. - Develop generative AI and agentic AI solutions that automate complex supply chain workflows and deliver intelligent, adaptive recommendations to customers. - Formulate real-world business problems as machine learning problems; define data requirements, model architectures, evaluation metrics, and experimentation frameworks. - Drive end-to-end applied science projects from ideation through experimentation, offline evaluation, A/B testing, and production deployment at scale. - Collaborate with engineering, product management, and business stakeholders to translate scientific capabilities into customer-facing product features, and mentor other scientists to raise the team's technical bar. A day in the life You will start many mornings reviewing experiment results and model metrics before joining a science sync where you and your teammates discuss progress, debug tricky modeling issues, and brainstorm new approaches. From there, you may spend focused time writing and testing model code in Python or PyTorch, running offline evaluations, or preparing an A/B test for a new forecasting algorithm. Expect regular working sessions with software engineers to integrate your models into production services, and occasional deep-dive reviews where you present your scientific approach and findings to the broader team. About the team The AWS Applied AI Solutions team builds enterprise applications that leverage Amazon's operational expertise to solve real-world supply chain challenges for millions of companies. We operate like a startup within AWS, moving fast and shipping iteratively with modern AI technologies. We invest in your growth through mentorship from experienced scientists, conference publication support, and internal science reading groups. If your career hasn't followed a traditional path, we encourage you to apply — we value varied experiences and perspectives.
Data Scientist II, Device Economics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking Data Scientist II with strong science application skills to join our Device Economics team. This role will focus primarily on Amazon's innovative devices and services (e.g. Echo Family of Devices), working at the intersection of economic modeling, forecasting science, and business strategy. The ideal candidate will be responsible for pre-launch forecasts, annualized overall forecasts, identifying substitution patterns, and partnering closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand the evolution of the Devices portfolio. Key job responsibilities Forecasting & Modeling 1. Develop and maintain pre-launch forecasts and annualized overall forecasts for Amazon Devices 2. Identify and model substitution patterns across the device portfolio 3. Build economic and financial models to support demand planning and business decisions 4. Formulate relevant analytical frameworks to address key economic issues in device forecasting Science Communication & Collaboration 1. Explain complex science models and methodologies to non-technical stakeholders including product managers and marketing managers 2. Collaborate with economists, data scientists, and applied scientists across Decision Science 3. Present results of analyses to cross-functional teams and leadership 4. Build trust in science models and forecast outputs with product teams Innovation & Strategic Thinking 1. Think creatively about ways that leading-edge analytics and emerging data sources can address Devices' most pressing business challenges 2. Help internal teams leverage analytic tools to better manage innovation 3. Conduct empirical studies and perform quantitative and qualitative research 4. Identify opportunities to improve forecasting accuracy and business impact Cross-Functional Partnership 1. Work closely with product managers and marketing managers to understand portfolio evolution and business strategy 2. Support DSO leadership in quarterly business reviews and strategic planning A day in the life Your days will be split between refining and building models and working with business leaders to interpret them. You own science-based forecasts that can directly impact Amazon's bottom line on the order of multi-million dollar decisions. - You will perform model refreshes or updates to analyses as needed; and, - You will be expected to develop new techniques to process large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to design of automated systems. About the team The Decision Science team within DSO (Device Supply Organization) is responsible for forecasting and demand planning initiatives across Amazon Devices. The DSO team of 300+ engineers, scientists, and PMs applies quantitative methods and data-driven approaches to replace judgment-based decisions with science-driven forecasts. Decision Science focuses on lifetime demand forecasting using econometric and machine learning models for rapid reforecasting, mix adjustments, and portfolio management for new product launches. We also inform to go/no-go investment decision for new product initiatives
Manager, Applied Science- Manipulation & Autonomy , Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to drive the development of next-generation manipulation and autonomy systems for robots operating in complex, real-world environments. This role is designed for an exceptional technical leader with a strong research background and a passion for translating cutting-edge ideas into working robotic systems. You will play a central role in defining the technical direction of our manipulation and autonomy stack, from problem formulation and algorithm design to system integration and real-world deployment. While this role is hands-on and deeply technical, it is also expected to evolve toward technical leadership and team building over time. Key job responsibilities - Lead research and development of manipulation and autonomy systems for robots, including planning, control, learning, and closed-loop execution - Design and implement algorithms, especially focused around autonomy and interaction with dynamic environments - Work closely with perception, motor control, hardware, and systems teams to build tightly integrated autonomy pipelines - Define evaluation methodologies, benchmarks, and simulation-to-real workflows for manipulation and autonomy - Stay deeply engaged with the research community, selectively incorporating state-of-the-art techniques into deployed systems - Mentor and guide other researchers and engineers, help set technical direction, and contribute to team growth and research culture - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Bridge research initiatives with practical engineering implementation About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Applied Scientist II, Cross Border Science and Analytics
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Cross-Border (XB) Science & Analytics team is at the heart of Amazon's international marketplace expansion, powering science-driven solutions that enable customers across 20+ countries to discover and purchase products seamlessly across borders. Our work directly impacts millions in annualized business value through ML models, algorithms, and data-driven systems that solve some of Amazon's most complex cross-border challenges. We are a lean, high-impact team of scientists working across various programs spanning search ranking, demand forecasting, pricing optimization, product recommendations, language understanding, and generative AI. We partner closely with product, engineering, and business teams across Amazon's global retail organization to take science from ideation to production at scale. Key job responsibilities We are looking for a passionate and technically strong Applied Scientist to join our team. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy machine learning models and algorithms that directly improve the cross-border shopping experience for millions of Amazon customers worldwide. You will work on challenging, ambiguous problems—from improving search relevance across languages to building ML-powered pricing and recommendation systems—with significant autonomy and end-to-end ownership. This is a hands-on, high-visibility role. You will publish your research internally and externally, collaborate with world-class scientists and engineers, and see your work go live across Amazon's global marketplaces. A day in the life Research & Experimentation Analyze large-scale datasets to identify patterns, formulate hypotheses, and design experiments Develop and iterate on ML models (deep learning, NLP, ranking, causal inference) to improve cross-border product discovery, relevance, and conversion Design and run A/B experiments on live traffic to measure model impact against business and customer metrics Building & Shipping Write production-quality code (Python, Java/Scala) and work with SDEs to deploy models into real-time and batch inference pipelines Build end-to-end ML pipelines—from data ingestion and feature engineering to training, evaluation, and online serving Own model monitoring, performance debugging, and iterative improvements post-launch Collaboration & Communication Participate in weekly science syncs, design reviews, and cross-functional standups with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders Translate business problems into well-defined science problems, and communicate results and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences Contribute to technical documentation—architecture wikis, experiment write-ups, and model cards Growth & Community Present at internal ML paper reading sessions and science forums Stay current with state-of-the-art research (NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, KDD) and bring new ideas to the team Mentor junior scientists and interns; participate in hiring interviews and debriefs Publish findings in top-tier venues and file patents where applicable
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