Sr. Applied Scientist, Amazon Personalization - Customer 360

We're looking for a senior scientist to lead the research direction for a system that gives AI persistent, compounding memory. This is a new problem space — not recommendation, not search, not summarization, though it draws from all three. The right scientist will define what this field becomes. You'll own the scientific roadmap, run a research agenda with real-world deployment targets, and mentor junior scientists. The team is forming now. Your first week will involve scoping experiments, not reading onboarding docs. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will own the scientific roadmap for personalization initiatives, identifying high-impact research directions and translating ambiguous problems into well-defined ML formulations. You will lead end-to-end systems spanning knowledge acquisition, retrieval, and reasoning. Specific responsibilities include: 1. Define the scientific roadmap for knowledge acquisition, representation, and retrieval at organizational scale. 2. Lead research on how AI systems should learn from experience — what to capture, how to generalize, when to forget. 3. Design evaluation frameworks for a system where "quality" means something new — right knowledge, right context, right confidence level. 4. Own end-to-end research from problem formulation through production impact measurement. 5. Mentor Applied Scientists and establish scientific standards for a new team. 6. Partner with engineering leadership to translate research into architecture decisions that shape the product. 7. Drive technical decisions on model architecture, training methodology, and evaluation frameworks, balancing scientific rigor with business impact. 8. Publish at top-tier venues and advance the state of the art in applied knowledge systems.

Born out of Amazon's Personalization organization, which pioneered personalization at internet scale. We're applying deep expertise in large-scale ML to a fundamentally new domain where the signal space, objective functions, and evaluation criteria are all open research questions. The team values innovation and offers a safe place to try, fail, and learn while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Everyone is a leader and owner for everything we do as a team. We offer creative space with an entrepreneurial work environment focusing on customer obsession.