Principal Applied Scientist, Items and Relationships Platform

Interested in setting the scientific vision for how every product at Amazon is understood, identified, and connected, with the opportunity to impact every Amazon customer and every selling partner?

The Items and Relationships Platform is the foundation that establishes what every product in Amazon's catalog is and how products relate to one another. We are rebuilding the platform to establish identity and relationships from meaning and context, using multimodal large language models and generative AI. This is a foundational problem: understanding products deeply enough to identify them, relate them, and keep the catalog trustworthy as it scales to the full breadth of Amazon's global contribution traffic.

A Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform owns the science direction for product identity and product relationships. It spans how contributions are resolved into a committed product identity, how products are connected into structural relationships (variations, multipacks, newer versions, lines of products, bundles), how confident those decisions are, and how their quality is measured. You will own the strategy for multimodal understanding, representation learning, relationship inference, calibration, and evaluation, so that science capability compounds across identity and relationships rather than being built one use case at a time.

This role lives at the intersection of research and production. Product identity and relationships are fundamentally an entity resolution problem: deciding what is the same product, and how different products relate, across diverse sources, languages, and formats. You will make the hard modeling calls on where sameness ends and relatedness begins, how models express and calibrate confidence, and how the platform measures quality when there is no external ground truth.

Successful candidates are passionate about translating ambiguous business goals into a coherent science roadmap that enables many businesses at once. You are comfortable being the final scientific arbiter on hard cross-team decisions, and working alongside top-notch applied scientists and software engineers to turn advanced research into production systems.

Key job responsibilities

As a Principal Applied Scientist on the Items and Relationships Platform, you will:

• Own the science direction for product identity: define how products are semantically understood, resolved, and committed as coherent identities, navigating the precision/recall and friction/selection trade-offs inherent in every decision
• Build representations that decide both sameness and typed relatedness, and drive relationship inference from semantic identity rather than one pipeline per relationship type
• Own structural relationship science across variations, multipacks and base products, newer versions, lines of products, and bundles, and discover new relationship types from the gap between defined policy and what identity reveals
• Own calibration and evaluation science: define how models emit calibrated confidence, and build the LLM judge methodology and Catalog Identity Quality metric that measure identity and relationship quality at catalog scale
• Partner with Principal Engineers on cost-aware modeling (cascades, distillation, routing) and close the loop from production signals and corrections back into training
• Set science direction partnering with ACCS Applied Science teams, mentoring senior and principal-track scientists, and driving the documentation and publication of scientific innovation

A day in the life

On a typical day, you move between setting science direction and going deep on hard problems: reviewing a multimodal identity model or a relationship inference experiment with scientists, deciding how a borderline case (a multipack, a newer version, a near-identical variant) should be modeled, and pressure-testing whether a quality gain is real by examining the judge and its calibration. You also spend time zoomed out, shaping the longer-term science roadmap, aligning with Principal Engineers and partner teams on the identity and relationship signals they consume, and mentoring scientists as they take on the ambiguous, high-impact problems that define the platform's future.

About the team

The Items and Relationships Platform advances state-of-the-art GenAI to deeply understand, uniquely identify, and meaningfully connect every product at Amazon scale. We build the canonical product identity, matching, and relationship systems that power Amazon's universal catalog: eliminating duplicates, preventing abuse, keeping product families coherent, and integrating the world's product data to power agentic shopping and trusted discovery for customers worldwide. We solve foundational challenges including schema-agnostic multimodal understanding, relationship inference, evaluation without ground truth, and efficient inference at reduced cost.