Lead, Applied AI & ML for Gaming

Amazon; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 184,000 - 249,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. seeks an Applied Science Manager to lead a new business unit on the GameLift team, building AI/ML-based gaming solutions at scale.

You will own the technical vision, drive rigorous experiments, and deliver production-grade ML systems with measurable impact. You will mentor a team of scientists and ML engineers, collaborate with product and engineering, and translate complex customer problems into scalable technical roadmaps while maintaining startup-like

Qualifications

• 3+ years of scientists or machine learning engineers management experience
• Knowledge of ML, NLP, Information Retrieval and Analytics
• Knowledge of machine learning approaches and algorithms
• 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
• Architect scalable, reusable ML platforms and inference systems designed to serve multiple products without proportional increases in staffing or rebuild cycles
• 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

Management experience

ML/NLP/IR/Analytics

ML approaches & algorithms

Scalable ML systems

Technical stakeholder communication

ML models for business

Job description

Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. seeks an Applied Science Manager to lead a new business unit on the GameLift team, building AI/ML-based gaming solutions at scale.

You will own the technical vision, drive rigorous experiments, and deliver production-grade ML systems with measurable impact. You will mentor a team of scientists and ML engineers, collaborate with product and engineering, and translate complex customer problems into scalable technical roadmaps while maintaining startup-like