Principal Applied Scientist, Amazon - Products and Brands

Position: Principal Applied Scientist, Amazon - Sponsored Products and Brands

The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through generative and agentic AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle; from ad creation, delivery, optimization, performance management, and beyond.

We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing state-of-the-art AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers and enhance the shopping experience. Within SPB, the SPB Offsite (SPBO) team builds solutions to extend campaigns to reach customers off the store and extend shopping experiences on third-party sites where shoppers search and discover products. We use industry-leading machine learning, high-scale low-latency systems, and gen AI technologies to create better sponsored customer experiences off the store.

Principal

Applied Scientist

– Role Overview

The Principal Applied Scientist for SPBO leads the technical vision and scientific strategy for extending Amazon Advertising's sponsored experiences to the broader web—meeting shoppers wherever they search, browse, and discover products. This is a multi-disciplinary scientific space spanning machine learning, large-scale optimization, causal inference, NLP, information retrieval, and generative AI. You will define and drive the science roadmap for how Amazon connects advertisers with high‑intent customers across third‑party environments at massive scale and with low latency.

As a GenAI‑first organization, we build foundational and agentic models that power advertiser use cases across Ads, while empowering our Applied Scientists to directly build and ship products. You will be a hands‑on technical leader who architects novel solutions end‑to‑end—from research through production—while mentoring a team of scientists across diverse domains.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Drive the scientific vision of the teams in your organization and advise and influence its technical leadership on ad serving, bidding, ranking, and offsite advertising models and products.
• Identify, tackle, and propose innovative solutions to intrinsically hard, previously unsolved problems in offsite ad tech.
• Bring clarity to complex problems, probing assumptions, illuminating pitfalls, fostering shared understanding, and guiding towards effective solutions.
• Serve and be recognized by internal and external peers as a thought leader in offsite advertising science, including real‑time bidding, personalization, privacy‑preserving ML, and generative AI for ad experiences.
• Influence your team's science and business strategy by driving one or more team roadmaps contributing to the organization's roadmap and taking responsibility for some organizational goals. Drive multiple new product features from inception to production launch.
• Guide the career development of others, actively mentoring and educating the larger applied science community on trends, technologies, and best practices.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands‑on work in predictive modeling and analysis experience
• PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field
• Experience working in predictive modeling and analysis
• Experience distilling informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or a related language
• Experience leading scientists and developing junior members from academia or industry into a career track in a business environment – over 10+ years of relevant work in industry or academia
• Knowledge of problem solving, algorithm design, and complexity analysis
• Experience creating novel algorithms and advancing the state of the art
• Peer‑reviewed scientific contributions in premier journals and conferences

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including…