The North America Stores GenAI Evaluation Media (GEM) team is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to help shape the future of visual shopping experiences. We're building CXs and foundational capabilities to understand, enhance, and generate real-time GenAI imagery, videos and CXs that inspire customers and drive purchase confidence, towards our vision to be the leader in visual media. Specifically, the charter will focus on visual agentic experiences, multi-modal personalization, and real-time image/video generation, looking ahead as customer shopping continues to inspirational assistant-driven experiences.
As a Senior Applied Scientist on the team, you will own and define the scientific vision, strategy, and roadmap for agentic AI capabilities that inform and guide the customer's shopping journey through visuals. This includes architecting and advancing core science primitives for multimodal understanding, visual content generation and editing, personalized virtual try-on, and automated quality assurance. You will establish the technical direction for foundational capabilities that enable customers to express and discover styles through multimodal conversation and receive personalized, visual responses that bring their ideas to life.
Your scientific leadership will emphasize accurate, real-time visual understanding and generation, contextual understanding, and scalable personalization, enabling agentic AI to actively collaborate with customers to achieve their style goals. You will set the long-term research agenda, bringing together computer vision, natural language processing, generative AI, and human-centered design to create agentic shopping experiences that are as intuitive as talking to a human specialist with a deep domain knowledge base. Success requires defining and institutionalizing robust evaluation frameworks and metrics, influencing and aligning cross-functional partners across organizations, validating asset effectiveness across diverse customer touch points, identifying whitespace opportunities, and staying at the forefront of rapid advances in AI technology.
The ideal candidate will have deep and broad technical expertise in Computer Vision, Generative AI, or related fields with a proven track record of connecting scientific work to customer and business outcomes at scale. You will serve as a technical leader and thought partner to scientists, engineers, and senior stakeholders across Amazon, mentoring junior scientists, raising the scientific bar, and delivering innovation while upholding a culture of scientific excellence and customer obsession. This role requires both rigorous research skills and practical engineering instincts, with a focus on delivering solutions that scale and a demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, make high-judgment trade-offs, and drive alignment across competing priorities. You will be expected to contribute to the broader scientific community through publications, patents, and internal knowledge sharing. This is a unique opportunity to shape the technical strategy for visual commerce through applied AI research, building the systems that will define how hundreds of millions of customers discover and evaluate products and styles through visual experiences.
Key job responsibilities Innovation & Technical Execution
Define the research roadmap and advance core science primitives for vision and language understanding, visual content generation and editing, virtual try-on, and automated quality assurance via state-of-the-art computer vision, machine learning, and generative AI Architect visual agentic systems, making high-judgment trade-offs across visual quality, relevance, latency, cost, and long-term extensibility Establish evaluation frameworks, metrics, and success criteria for the team's scientific initiatives, institutionalizing rigorous validation across customer touch points Own end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous research initiatives from problem formulation through experimentation to production deployment, with minimal guidance Identify whitespace opportunities by staying at the forefront of AI/ML advances and translating them into actionable research directions with clear customer and business impact Drive development and deployment of scalable agentic systems for visual content understanding and generation, ensuring architectural decisions support long-term platform evolution Set and continuously raise the scientific and engineering bar across the team Tackle the team's most complex technical problems while maintaining practical focus on customer value and solution generalizability Advance the team's scientific reputation through high-impact publications and presentations at top-tier internal and external venues, and generate intellectual property through patents
Cross-functional Influence & Leadership
Influence product and engineering roadmaps by partnering with senior leadership to shape customer-facing features grounded in scientific insight Drive technical alignment across multiple teams and organizations within Amazon, resolving ambiguity and building consensus on approaches Communicate research vision, findings, and technical trade-offs persuasively to executive, technical, and non-technical stakeholders, shaping investment decisions Mentor and develop junior and mid-level scientists, accelerating their growth and impact
Basic Qualifications
- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience
- 4+ years of applied research experience
- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in building machine learning models for business application
- Experience with conducting research in a corporate setting
- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
- Usage of generative AI tools to enhance workflow efficiency, with a willingness to learn effective prompting and evaluation practices.
- Ability to recognize opportunities where generative AI could enhance products, workflows, or customer experiences.
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
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The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 192,200.00 - 260,000.00 USD annually USA, WA, Seattle - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually