About the job
Build the scientific intelligence layer powering Amazon’s satellite manufacturing system. As an Applied Scientist, you will develop machine learning models that transform fragmented manufacturing, test, quality, and operational data into actionable intelligence that improves how satellites are built.
You will tackle ambiguous, high-impact problems where data is incomplete, noisy, and distributed, and where model outputs influence real-world manufacturing decisions. Your work will power AI-enabled workflows such as non-conformance disposition, root-cause analysis, and predictive test optimization - reducing defects, accelerating production, and helping create more intelligent, data-driven manufacturing systems.
Responsibilities
- Translate ambiguous manufacturing and operational problems into well-defined scientific problems, modeling approaches, and evaluation criteria
- Design, train, and deploy machine learning models, including LLM-based systems, retrieval models, and task-specific models
- Develop and evaluate models using large-scale, noisy, heterogeneous datasets with incomplete, delayed, or imperfect ground truth
- Apply state-of-the-art techniques in areas such as anomaly detection, root-cause inference, multimodal learning, information retrieval, and generative AI, adapting or extending them to meet project requirements
- Design experiments and evaluation frameworks that capture real-world failure modes, distribution shift, and decision risk
- Make principled tradeoffs among model complexity, data quality, accuracy, latency, cost, and maintainability
- Build production-quality scientific components with appropriate testing, documentation, monitoring, and operational mechanisms
- Work with Manufacturing, Quality, Test, and engineering partners to understand customer needs and translate them into effective scientific solutions
- Analyze model and system performance, identify gaps and root causes, and iteratively improve deployed solutions
- Clearly document scientific approaches, experimental results, design decisions, and lessons learned so that others can understand and reproduce the work
- Contribute to technical discussions, mentor less experienced teammates, and help advance scientific and engineering best practices within the team
Qualifications
Minimum
- 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 in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- 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
- Experience using Unix/Linux
- Experience in professional software development
- Experience with one or more areas such as natural language processing, information retrieval, multimodal learning, anomaly detection, causal or root-cause inference, or generative AI
- Experience training or deploying LLM-based systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or other modern AI systems
- Experience designing evaluation datasets and methodologies for production machine learning systems
- Experience working with noisy, incomplete, delayed, or weakly labeled data
- Experience adapting or extending state-of-the-art research techniques to solve practical business problems
- Experience building reliable, testable, and maintainable machine learning components for production environments
- Experience working with engineering, manufacturing, quality, test, or operations teams
- Experience in manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, or other complex physical-world systems
- Experience with governed, access-controlled, or compliance-constrained data environments
- Experience communicating scientific methods, results, and tradeoffs through clear technical documentation or research publications