Applied Scientist, WW Pricing & Promotions Science

Amazon • Seattle, WA

1d

About The Position

Amazon's Worldwide Pricing & Promotions organization is seeking a strong Applied
Scientist to help solve complex business problems involving pricing algorithms
and promotional strategies at a global scale. This Applied Scientist will
operate in a team of other scientists and economists. Our team applies causal
inferences, statistics, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, economics,
and experimentation to drive actionable insights and to improve strategic
business decision-making.

This is an individual contributor role that requires collaboration across teams
and functions to solve core business problems for the company around setting new
pricing and promotional strategies. The work is part of significant scientific
investments in promotions intelligence systems that forecast customer demand and
optimize promotions strategies across different surfaces.

As an Applied Scientist on the WW Pricing & Promotions Science team, you invent
or adapt new scientific approaches, models, or algorithms to solve real-world
business problems. Your work uses the latest (or the most appropriate)
techniques from academic literature. You work semi-autonomously to successfully
deliver solutions that are consistently of high quality (efficient,
reproducible, testable code). You work collaboratively with teammates, partners,
and stakeholders. You recognize discordant views and take part in constructive
dialogue to resolve them. You adopt and identify opportunities to refine
mechanisms to raise the general scientific knowledge in the team.

The WW Pricing & Promotions Science team is responsible for driving scientific
innovation to support pricing and promotions programs across Amazon's
businesses. We specialize in experimental and observational causal methods,
forecasting, and optimization. We apply these tools to drive business decision
making at scale, leading to launch decisions of new pricing algorithms and new
promotion strategies, understanding short- and long-term value of different
programs, and the prioritization of budget allocations. We also develop models
to set optimal prices and promotions, and define innovative price guardrails and
incentives to optimize for long-term program health.

Requirements

• PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
• 3+ years of building models for business application experience
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing
• Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
• Experience in investigating, designing, prototyping, and delivering new and innovative system solutions

Nice To Haves

• Experience implementing algorithms using toolkits and self-developed code
• Experience in designing experiments and statistical analysis of results
• Experience in state-of-the-art deep learning models architecture design and deep learning training and optimization and model pruning
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals

Responsibilities

• Invent or adapt new scientific approaches, models, or algorithms inspired and driven by customers' needs and benefits
• Produce research papers and reports that have the same level of correctness, scholarship, usefulness, completeness, depth, rigor, and originality as a top-tier external publication
• Implement solutions that will be deployed into production or directly support production systems
• Write clear, useful documentation describing algorithms and design choices in your components to make it possible for others to understand and reproduce your work
• Contribute to operational excellence in the team's deliverable
• Analyze the performance of your methods and models to understand the gaps, and iteratively propose solutions to improve
• Champion the adoption of scientific advancements in the team
• Help new teammates ramp up and understand who our customers are, what their needs are, how the team's solutions work, and how scientific components fit in those solutions

Benefits

• 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
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree