Applied Scientist II, Worldwide Returns & Recommerce - Science

Welcome to the Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team (WWR&R) at Amazon.com.

WWR&R is an agile, innovative organization dedicated to ‘making zero happen’ to benefit our customers, our company, and the environment. Our goal is to achieve the three zeroes: zero cost of returns, zero waste, and zero defects. We do this by developing products and driving truly innovative operational excellence to help customers keep what they buy, recover returned and damaged product value, keep thousands of tons of waste from landfills, and create the best customer returns experience in the world. We have an eye to the future - we create long-term value at Amazon by focusing not just on the bottom line, but on the planet. We are building the most sustainable re-use channel we can by driving multiple aspects of the Circular Economy for Amazon - Returns & ReCommerce.

Amazon WWR&R is comprised of business, product, operational, program, software engineering and data teams that manage the life of a returned or damaged product from a customer to the warehouse and on to its next best use. Our work is broad and deep: we train machine learning models to automate routing and find signals to optimize re-use; we invent new channels to give products a second life; we develop highly respected product support to help customers love what they buy; we pilot smarter product evaluations; we work from the customer backward to find ways to make the return experience remarkably delightful and easy; and we do it all while scrutinizing our business with laser focus.

You will help create everything from customer-facing and vendor-facing websites to the internal software and tools behind the reverse-logistics process. You can develop scalable, high-availability solutions to solve complex and broad business problems.

We are a group that has fun at work while driving incredible customer, business, and environmental impact. We are backed by a strong leadership group dedicated to operational excellence that empowers a reasonable work-life balance. As an established, experienced team, we offer the scope and support needed for substantial career growth.

Amazon is earth’s most customer-centric company and through WWR&R, the earth is our customer too. Come join us and innovate with the Amazon Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team!

Key job responsibilities

* Design, develop, and evaluate highly innovative models for Natural Language Programming (NLP), Large Language Model (LLM), or Large Computer Vision Models.

* Use SQL to query and analyze the data.

* Use Python, Jupyter notebook, and Pytorch to train/test/deploy ML models.

* Use machine learning and analytical techniques to create scalable solutions for business problems.

* Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches.

* Mentor interns.

* Work closely with data & software engineering teams to build model implementations and integrate successful models and algorithms in production systems at very large scale.

About the team

When a customer returns a package to Amazon, the request and package will be passed through our WWRR machine learning (ML) systems so that we could improve the customer experience, identify return root cause, optimize re-use, and evaluate the returned package. Our problems touch multiple modalities spanning from: textual, categorical, image, to speech data.

We operate at large scale and rely on state-of-the-art modeling techniques to power our ML models: XGBoost, BERT, Vision Transformers, Large Language Models.

Basic qualifications

- 2+ years of building models for business application experience

- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience

- 3+ years of programming in Java, C++, Python or related language experience

- Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

- Experience with popular deep learning frameworks such as MxNet and Tensor Flow

Preferred qualifications

- Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application

- Experience in building speech recognition, machine translation and natural language processing systems (e.g., commercial speech products or government speech projects)

- Experience developing and implementing deep learning algorithms, particularly with respect to computer vision algorithms

- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals

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 https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.