Applied Scientist, Sponsored Products

About Sponsored Products and Brands
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through generative 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, 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.

About our team

The Targeting and Recommendations team within Sponsored Products and Brands empowers advertisers with intelligent targeting controls and one-click campaign recommendations that automatically populate optimal settings based on ASIN data. This comprehensive suite provides advanced targeting capabilities through AI-generated keyword and ASIN suggestions, sophisticated targeting controls including Negative Targeting, Manual Targeting with Product Attribute Targeting (PAT) and Keyword Targeting (KWT), and Automated Targeting (ATv2). Our vision is to build a revolutionary, highly personalized and context-aware agentic advertiser guidance system that seamlessly integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with sophisticated tooling, operating across both conversational and traditional ad console experiences while scaling from natural language queries to proactive, intelligent guidance delivery based on deep advertiser understanding, ultimately enhancing both targeting precision and one-click campaign optimization. Through strategic partnerships across Ad Console, Sales, and Marketing teams, we identify high-impact opportunities spanning from strategic product guidance to granular keyword optimization and deliver them through personalized, scalable experiences grounded in state-of-the-art agent architectures, reasoning frameworks, sophisticated tool integration, and model customization approaches including tuning, MCP, and preference optimization. This presents an exceptional opportunity to shape the future of e-commerce advertising through advanced AI technology at unprecedented scale, creating solutions that directly impact millions of advertisers.

Key job responsibilities
* Design and build targeting and 1 click recommendation 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).
* 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.
* Develop agentic architectures that integrate planning, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning.

A day in the life
As an Applied Scientist on our team, your days will be immersed in collaborative problem-solving and strategic innovation. You'll partner closely with expert applied scientists, software engineers, and product managers to tackle complex advertising challenges through creative, data-driven solutions. Your work will center on developing sophisticated machine learning and AI models, leveraging state-of-the-art techniques in natural language processing, recommendation systems, and agentic AI frameworks. From designing novel targeting algorithms to building personalized guidance systems, you'll contribute to breakthrough innovations

Basic Qualifications:
- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field 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

Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience in professional software development
- Strong technical fluency in Generative AI
- Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs), model fine tuning and prompt engineering
- Experience in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and AI model trade-offs (e.g., model size, latency, cost, and output quality)

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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 for more information. If the country/region you're applying in isn't listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

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