Applied Scientist, Customer Behavior Analytics

Amazon Amazon · Big Tech · Seattle, WA · Machine Learning Science

This role focuses on designing and developing machine learning solutions for customer behavior analytics at Amazon. Key responsibilities include fine-tuning language and generative models, developing recommendation and decision models, building temporal representations of customer behavior, and applying post-training optimization techniques. The role also involves developing evaluation frameworks and working with business and engineering teams to drive personalized customer experiences and business impact.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and fine-tune language and generative models for recommendation and engagement, including continued pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and preference-based alignment, to optimize for long-term customer value rather than short-term clicks.
  2. Develop generative recommendation and decision models that produce next-best customer engagement actions (e.g., recommendations, bundles, messaging, incentives, timing), conditioned on structured customer and household-level behavioral context.
  3. Build structured, temporal representations of customer behavior (e.g., lifecycle stage, needs, replenishment patterns, engagement history) and integrate them into generative and deep learning models to enable long-horizon reasoning.
  4. Experiment scalable representations of customer and household behavior that summarize long engagement history into compact states, supporting efficient, incremental inference in large-scale inference.
  5. Design and apply post-training optimization techniques (e.g., auxiliary objectives, preference modeling, offline reinforcement learning or policy optimization) to align model behavior with long-term engagement, satisfaction, and retention metrics.

Skills

Required

  • building models for business application
  • PhD or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
  • experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
  • programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
  • algorithms and data structures
  • parsing
  • numerical optimization
  • data mining
  • parallel and distributed computing
  • high-performance computing
  • practical machine learning experience
  • written and verbal communication

Nice to have

  • building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
  • state-of-the-art deep learning models architecture design
  • deep learning training and optimization
  • model pruning

What the JD emphasized

  • state-of-the-art technology
  • challenging scientific problems
  • state-of-the-art models
  • long-term customer value
  • long-horizon reasoning
  • large-scale inference
  • long-term engagement
  • robust evaluation frameworks
  • long-term customer outcomes
  • pushing the boundaries of what is scientifically possible
  • measurable customer satisfaction
  • business impact
  • shaping the future
  • driving innovation
  • improving customer satisfaction
  • customer-centric solutions

Other signals

  • design and fine-tune language and generative models
  • develop generative recommendation and decision models
  • build structured, temporal representations of customer behavior
  • experiment scalable representations of customer and household behavior
  • design and apply post-training optimization techniques
  • develop robust evaluation frameworks