Description
Amazon Advertising's Publisher Technologies team is looking for an experienced Applied Scientist with proven research experience in control theory, online machine learning, and/or mechanism design to drive innovative algorithms for ad-delivery at scale. Your work will directly shape pacing, yield optimization, and ad-selection for Amazon's publishers and impact experiences for hundreds of millions of users and devices.
About the team
Amazon Advertising operates at the intersection of eCommerce, streaming, and advertising, offering a rich array of digital advertising solutions with the goal of helping our customers find and discover anything they want to buy. We help advertisers reach customers across Amazon's owned and operated sites (publishers) across the web and on millions of devices such as Amazon.com, Prime Video, FreeVee, Kindles, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Alexa, Mobile, Twitch, and more.
Within Ads, Publisher Technologies is building the next generation of ad-serving products to allow our publishers to monetize their on-demand, streaming, and static content across Amazon’s ad network in a few clicks. Publishers interact directly with our technology, through programmatic APIs to optimize billions of impression opportunities per day.
About the role
Publisher Technologies is looking to build out our Recommendation and Decision Sciences team to drive innovation across ad-server delivery algorithms for budget pacing, ad-selection, and yield optimization. We seek to ensure the highest quality experiences for Amazon's customers by matching them with most relevant ads while ensuring optimal yield for publishers. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will research, invent, and apply cutting edge designs and methodologies in control theory, online optimization, and machine learning to improve publisher yield and customer experience. You will work closely with our engineering and product team to implement algorithms in production. In addition, you will contribute to the end state vision of AI enhanced ad-delivery. You will be a foundational member of the team that builds a world-class, green-field ad-delivery service for Amazon's video, audio, and display advertising.
To be successful in this role, you must be customer obsessed, have a deep technical background in both online algorithms and distributed systems, comfort dealing with ambiguity, an eye for detail, and a passion to identify and solve for practical considerations that occur when complex control-loops have to operate autonomously and reliably to make millisecond level decisions at scale. You are a technical leader with track record of building control theoretic and/or machine learning models in production to drive business KPIs such as budget delivery. If you are interested working on challenging and practical problems that impact hundreds of millions of users and devices and span cutting edge areas of optimization and AI while having fun on a rapidly expanding team, come join us!
Key job responsibilities
Developing new statistical, causal, machine learning, and simulation techniques and develop solution prototypes to drive innovation
Developing an understanding of key business metrics / KPIs and providing clear, compelling analysis that shapes the direction of our business
Working with technical and non-technical customers to design experiments, simulations, and communicate results
Collaborating with our dedicated software team to create production implementations for large-scale data analysis
Staying up-to-date with and contributing to the state-of-the-art research and methodologies in the area of advertising algorithms
Presenting research results to our internal research community
Leading training and informational sessions on our science and capabilities
Your contributions will be seen and recognized broadly within Amazon, contributing to the Amazon research corpus and patent portfolio.
We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations:
New York, NY, USA | Seattle, WA, USA | Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Basic Qualifications
PhD in engineering, technology, computer science, machine learning, robotics, operations research, statistics, mathematics or equivalent quantitative field
5+ years of applied research experience
Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
Experience in online decision making and/or closed loop control using either control theory, online learning, or online optimization algorithmsExcellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to effectively advocate technical solutions to research scientists, engineering teams and business leadersPreferred Qualifications
Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc.
Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.
Experience in auctions or mechanism design
Advertising technology experienceExperience with publisher side advertising technologies such as pacing, yield optimization, ranking, or corresponding capabilities such as bidding on the demand sideStrong publication record with evidence of original work in the areas of control theory, online machine learning, or closed loop optimization.Experience with A/B testing and experiment design methodologiesExperience with deploying and managing online control and/or machine learning algorithms in productionProven experience leading the delivery of large-scale, high-quality systemsExperience working with AWS Services, consuming, managing large scale datasets.Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.
Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $136,000/year in our lowest geographic market up to $260,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.