Sr. Applied Scientist, SPB Advertiser Guidance

Amazon Jobs; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company is seeking an Applied Scientist in Palo Alto, CA, to drive innovative AI solutions for advertisers. The role involves designing advanced architectures, optimizing models, and collaborating across teams to enhance campaign management. Candidates should have a strong research background, with experience in machine learning and programming. Competitive compensation and benefits are offered, reflecting the market's costs.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Medical benefits

Equity options

Qualifications

• 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems.
• Experience with modeling tools like scikit-learn.

Responsibilities

• Lead business, science and engineering strategy for Sponsored Products.
• Design and implement model optimization techniques.
• Collaborate with peers across engineering and product.

Skills

Machine Learning models building

Experience in Java

Experience in Python

Neural deep learning methods

Modeling tools usage

Education

PhD or Master's degree

Tools

R

Tensorflow

Hadoop

Job description

Overview

We are looking for a passionate Applied Scientist to help pioneer the next generation of agentic AI applications for Amazon advertisers. In this role, you will design agentic architectures, develop tools and datasets, and contribute to building systems that can reason, plan, and act autonomously across complex advertiser workflows.

You will work at the forefront of applied AI, developing methods for fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and preference optimization, while helping create evaluation frameworks that ensure safety, reliability, and trust at scale. You will work backwards from the needs of advertisers—delivering customer-facing products that directly help them create, optimize, and grow their campaigns.

Beyond building models, you will advance the agent ecosystem by experimenting with and applying core primitives such as tool orchestration, multi-step reasoning, and adaptive preference-driven behavior. This role requires working independently on ambiguous technical problems, collaborating closely with scientists, engineers, and product managers to bring innovative solutions into production.

Responsibilities

• Lead business, science and engineering strategy and roadmap for Sponsored Products Agentic Advertiser Guidance.
• Design and build agents to guide advertisers in conversational and non-conversational experience.
• Design and implement advanced model and agent optimization techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, instruction tuning and preference optimization (e.g., DPO/IPO).
• Curate datasets and tools for MCP.
• Build evaluation pipelines for agent workflows, including automated benchmarks, multi-step reasoning tests, and safety guardrails.
• Develop agentic architectures (e.g., CoT, ToT, ReAct) that integrate planning, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning.
• Prototype and iterate on multi-agent orchestration frameworks and workflows.
• Collaborate with peers across engineering and product to bring scientific innovations into production.
• Stay current with the latest research in LLMs, RL, and agent-based AI, and translate findings into practical applications.

About the team

The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through the latest generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights.

We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you\'re energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what\'s possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising.

The Advertiser Guidance team within Sponsored Products and Brands is focused on guiding and supporting 1.6MM advertisers to meet their advertising needs of creating and managing ad campaigns. At this scale, the complexity of diverse advertiser goals, campaign types, and market dynamics creates both a massive technical challenge and a transformative opportunity: even small improvements in guidance systems can have outsized impact on advertiser success and Amazon’s retail ecosystem.

Our vision is to build a highly personalized, context-aware agentic advertiser guidance system that leverages LLMs together with tools such as auction simulations, ML models, and optimization algorithms. This agentic framework, will operate across both chat and non-chat experiences in the ad console, scaling to natural language queries as well as proactively delivering guidance based on deep understanding of the advertiser. To execute this vision, we collaborate closely with stakeholders across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing to identify opportunities—from high-level product guidance down to granular keyword recommendations—and deliver them through a tailored, personalized experience. Our work is grounded in state-of-the-art agent architectures, tool integration, reasoning frameworks, and model customization approaches (including tuning, MCP, and preference optimization), ensuring our systems are both scalable and adaptive.

Qualifications

• PhD, or Master\'s degree and 6+ 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
• Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning
• Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc.
• Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.

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.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit the information page for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $150,400/year in our lowest geographic market up to $260,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit the information page on employee benefits. This position will remain posted until filled. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.