Applied Science Lead, AI for Gaming & Live Ops

Amazon Science; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 249,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Science seeks an Applied Science Manager for a new GameLift-based unit focused on AI/ML applications in gaming. You will own the technical vision, scientific rigor, and end-to-end delivery of applied science initiatives at scale, translating opportunities into production-grade ML systems that deliver measurable customer and commercial impact.

This hands-on leader will mentor scientists and ML engineers, define a practical roadmap, uphold rigorous experimentation, and partner with product

Qualifications

• 3+ years of scientists or ML engineers management experience.
• Knowledge of ML, NLP, Information Retrieval and Analytics.
• Experience building complex highly-scalable systems that involve predictive models or applications of machine learning.
• Experience communicating with users, other technical teams, and management to collect requirements, describe software product features, and technical designs.
• Experience in building machine learning models for business application.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the technical roadmap for applied science initiatives, balancing frontier research with production delivery requirements and customer timelines.
• Lead rigorous model development processes including algorithm selection, offline evaluation, A/B testing design, and statistical significance assessment, ensuring every production decision is grounded in scientific evidence rather than intuition.
• Architect scalable, reusable ML platforms and inference systems designed to serve multiple products without proportional increases in staffing or rebuild cycles, enabling the team to move fast across a growing portfolio.
• Manage and develop a team of applied scientists and ML engineers, providing technical mentorship, career growth opportunities, and performance management while maintaining a high hiring bar.
• Drive end-to-end AI deployment from research prototyping through production inference, owning latency, availability, and cost targets alongside model quality metrics.
• Establish and enforce scientific standards across all team projects, including peer review mechanisms, documentation requirements, and reproducibility practices that ensure technical decisions withstand scrutiny.
• Partner cross-functionally with product managers, software engineers, and business leaders to translate customer problems into well-scoped technical solutions with clear success criteria.
• Maintain a builder roadmap that sequences product launches against customer commitments, managing dependencies and communicating tradeoffs to stakeholders when scope or timeline pressure arises.
• Enable the team to operate with startup-level autonomy and speed of invention while maintaining the operational discipline required for production systems serving customers at scale.
• Stay current with developments across the AI/ML research landscape, identifying opportunities to apply new techniques.

Skills

ML leadership

NLP & IR

Scalable systems

Modeling for business

Stakeholder communication

Team management

Job description

Amazon Science seeks an Applied Science Manager for a new GameLift-based unit focused on AI/ML applications in gaming. You will own the technical vision, scientific rigor, and end-to-end delivery of applied science initiatives at scale, translating opportunities into production-grade ML systems that deliver measurable customer and commercial impact.

This hands-on leader will mentor scientists and ML engineers, define a practical roadmap, uphold rigorous experimentation, and partner with product