Applied Science Manager , Personalization Team

Take Earth's most customer-centric company. Mix in hundreds of millions of shoppers spending tens of billions of pounds annually, an exciting opportunity to build next-generation shopping experiences, Amazon’s tremendous computational resources, and our extensive e-Commerce experience. What do you get? The most exciting Recommendations/Personalization position in the industry.

Are you passionate about working on disruptive ideas? Are you obsessed with finding and building the most innovative and customer-friendly user experiences? Have you built and launched new experiences that impact shoppers all around the world? This is a unique opportunity that combines the ability to build exciting, new user experiences for Amazon's customers, with the opportunity to work with Big Data, Machine Learning, and other advanced techniques to provide the best personalized experience for hundreds of millions of Amazon's customers.

More about the role:
Our organization is growing our focus on the shopping experience for health & personal care, groceries, and other nascent product categories. We are responsible for one of the largest and fastest-growing businesses in the company, and are seeking an applied science manager to build a team of world-class software engineers and scientists that will deliver on an Amazon-critical charter. This team will need to deliver experiences that delight customers and create long-term value for the company.

This role requires good technical skills, a deep understanding of machine learning approaches, and a passion for melding ML with great user experience/design. You must have a demonstrated ability for optimizing, developing, launching, and maintaining large-scale production systems. As a key member of the team, you will oversee all aspects of the software lifecycle: design, experimentation, implementation, and testing. You should be willing to dive deep when needed, move rapidly with a bias for action, and get things done. You should have an entrepreneurial spirit, love autonomy, know how to deliver, and long for the opportunity to build pioneering solutions to challenging problems. This role will demand resourcefulness and willingness to learn on both the technical and business side. The challenges we take on can involve a mix of large-scale distributed systems, big data technologies, machine learning science, and require a keen sense of customer obsession and long-term strategic thinking.

About you:
You're a former engineer or scientist who can see the bigger picture. While your career is full of individual wins, it is now more fulfilling when your team is able to build, deliver, and impress. You enjoy leading and mentoring others, and want to work on projects that require innovative and creative thinking alongside deep technical problem solving. You challenge yourself and others to constantly come up with better solutions, and can deliver on a technical roadmap that serves our customers and the business optimally. You communicate clearly, and hold yourself and your team to a high bar.

As an Applied Science Manager, you will be responsible for ensuring your team successfully delivers on design, development, testing, experimentation, and the operations of algorithms, datasets, and systems your team owns. You should have an established track record of launching customer-facing experiences, deep technical ability, and excellent project management and communication skills. This role requires working closely with product management to define strategy and requirements, and leading a development team from design through delivery and subsequent operation. This position will also require regular communication with senior management on status, risks, and strategy.

About our organization:
Amazon’s Personalization organization is a small, high-performing group that leverages Amazon’s expertise in machine learning, big data, and distributed systems to deliver the best shopping experiences for our customers. We work end-to-end, from foundational backend systems to future-forward user interfaces. Our team’s culture is centered on rapid prototyping, rigorous experimentation, and data-driven decision-making. We run hundreds of experiments each year and our work has revolutionized e-commerce with features such as “Customers Who Bought Also Bought” and “Recommended for You”. We care deeply about our customers, as well as the well-being and growth of our team members. Amazon’s internal surveys regularly recognize us as one of the best engineering organizations to work for in the company, with visible high-impact work, low operational load, respectful work-life balance, and continual opportunity to learn and grow. This is a track record we are proud of and will continue to uphold. We are looking for creative and innovative leaders with a similar penchant for deeply-technical problem solving and the ability to lead, mentor, and deliver while upholding Amazon’s leadership principles.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- Master's degree
- Knowledge of ML, NLP, Information Retrieval and Analytics
- Experience directly managing scientists or machine learning engineers
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in building machine learning models for business application
- Experience in applied research

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
- Experience building complex software systems, especially involving deep learning, machine learning and computer vision, that have been successfully delivered to customers