Futures Design is the advanced concept design and incubation team within Amazon’s Device and Services Design Group (DDG). We are responsible for exploring and defining think (very) big opportunities globally and locally — so that we can better understand how new products and services might enrich the lives of our customers and so that product teams and leaders can align on where we're going and why we're going there. We focus on a 3–10+ year time frame, with the runway to invent and design category-defining products and transformational customer experiences. Working with Amazon business and technology partners, we use research, design, and prototyping to guide early product development, bring greater clarity to engineering goals, and develop a UX-grounded point of view.
Our team is dedicated to unlocking new foundational capabilities in generative AI, guided by the thesis that embedding understanding through human factors, cognitive science, and socioeconomics is crucial to building AI systems that align with human needs. We place particular emphasis on the capabilities of simulacra through agentic systems and experiential/evolutionary learning, which we believe are vital to accelerating the development of AI as an aligned partner. Joining our team will give you the chance to drive key decisions that will impact the lives of millions of Amazon customers.
Key job responsibilities
You will be responsible for defining key research directions, adopting or inventing new machine learning techniques, conducting rigorous experiments, publishing results, and ensuring that research is translated into practice. You will develop long-term strategies, persuade teams to adopt those strategies, propose goals and deliver on them. You will also participate in organizational planning, hiring, mentorship and leadership development. You will be technically fearless and with a passion for building scalable science and engineering solutions. You will serve as a key scientific resource in full-cycle development (conception, design, implementation, testing to documentation, delivery, and maintenance).
A day in the life
We're looking for a Principal Applied Scientist to join the growing DDG Futures Design team.
You thrive in ambiguity and paradigm shifts – remaking assumptions of how customers engage, devices operate, and builders create. You apply deep expertise that spans design, technology, and product, grounding state-of-the-art emerging technologies through storytelling and a maker's mindset. You learn and adapt technology trends to enduring customer problems through customer empathy, code, and iterative experimentation.
You will wear multiple hats to quickly assimilate customer problems, convert them to hypotheses, and test them using efficient technologies and design methods to build stakeholder buy-in. You’ll help your peers unlock challenging scenarios and mature the design studio’s ability to deliver design at scale across a breadth of devices and interaction modalities. You will work around limitations and push capabilities through your work. Your curiosity will inspire those around you and facilitate team growth, while your hands-on, collaborative nature will build trust with your peers and studio partners.
Minimum Requirements
- PhD with specialization in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, or computational cognitive science
- 10+ years of combined academic and research experience
- Multi-disciplinary expertise with demonstrated application of AI to a human-centered problem space (e.g., human factors or experiential learning)
- Functional thought leader, sought after for key tech decisions
- Can successfully sell ideas to executive level decision makers
- Mentors and trains the research scientist community on complex technical issues
- Proven track record of building complex solutions in ambiguous environments
- Experience in building complex, real-time systems involving AI, ML, and NLP with successful delivery to customers
- Experience developing software in traditional programming languages (e.g., Python, C++, Java)
- Excellent written and spoken communication skills
- Proven record of developing new approaches, algorithms, application areas, etc.
- Extensive research expertise in generative AI, computer vision, machine learning, or NLP
- Ability to develop machine learning platform strategies and influence the organization adopting new approaches, concepts, and paradigms
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