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Principal Data Scientist, Core Shopping Data Science

Amazon.com Inc
  • Seattle, WA
    6 days ago

    Job Description

    Every day, hundreds of millions of customers arrive on Amazon"s Homepage, search for a product, and land on a detail page. Along the way, some of what we show them is irrelevant - a recommendation that misreads what they want, a widget that repeats what they just saw, a headline that doesn"t say what it means, a product that shouldn"t have been surfaced at all. We have built the ability to detect these defects at scale using Large Language Models (LLMs), and we report them to Amazon"s most senior leadership as a company-level measure of shopping quality. What we have not yet built is the confidence to act on every one of them.

    That is the problem you will own.

    Today, the most consequential categories of shopping defects - product quality, duplication, staleness,

    irrelevance - go largely unenforced. Not because we cannot detect them, but because we have not

    yet clearly defined when they lead to customer dissatisfaction. These are genuinely hard questions. When is a recommendation irrelevant rather than merely unexpected? When are two products duplicates rather than legitimate alternatives? Every answer carries consequences for customers and advertisers.

    As Principal Data Scientist, you will own the analytical rigor behind Amazon"s store quality metrics end-to-end: how they are defined, how faithfully our LLM implementations execute those definitions, and how accurate the resulting judgments actually are across relevance, presentation, product quality, and duplication. You will go deep enough to inspect individual model judgments and read the edge cases where they break, then come back up to argue definitional questions with the leaders who own the outcomes on both sides. You will also define experiments that will turn judgement into facts backed by data.

    Your influence will come from deep dives so well-constructed that stakeholders across two large organizations change their minds. Getting there means building the tooling that makes rigor repeatable rather than heroic: agents that walk the store the way a customer would, automated inspection of experiments, and feedback loops that finally connect what customers tell us directly to the metrics we optimize. Much of the customer voice we already collect goes underused today; you will change that. You will begin on the Homepage, where measurement is most mature, then extend the methodology to Detail Page and Search - carrying not just the metrics but the standard of evidence with them.

    Key job responsibilities

    • Validate store quality metrics end-to-end: inspect metric definitions, audit LLM implementations, and evaluate LLM judgment accuracy across quality dimensions (relevance, presentation, product quality, duplicates)
    • Starting with Homepage, extending cross-page - identify gaps and inconsistencies between Organic and Ads treatments that block the tiered enforcement framework
    • Drive alignment through deep dives that present evidence to both Stores and Ads stakeholders
    • Build and deliver deep-dive tooling (walk-the-store bots, automated experiment inspection via Gecko, VoC feedback loops) that make metric validation repeatable and self-serve
    • Own the analytical rigor behind the alignment on definitions of subjective/debated metrics and moving them to aligned/enforceable

    About the team

    Core Shopping Data Science owns the measurement of shopping quality across Amazon"s Core Shopping eexperiences, including defect metrics reviewed by Amazon"s most senior leadership. We focus on the long term and big picture to ensure that the full Amazon shopping experience balances strategic trade-offs. We work across Stores and Advertising, partnering with personalization, ranking, and search teams to turn measurement into changes customers can feel.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationSeattle, WA
    IndustryRetail
    Company Size10,000 employees or more
    Year Founded1994
    Websitehttp://Amazon.com/militaryroles

    About Company

    At Amazon, we don’t wait for the next big idea to present itself. We envision the shape of impossible things and then we boldly make them reality. So far, this mindset has helped us achieve some incredible things. Let’s build new systems, challenge the status quo, and design the world we want to live in. We believe the work you do here will be the best work of your life.

    Wherever you are in your career exploration, Amazon likely has an opportunity for you. Our research scientists and engineers shape the future of natural language understanding with Alexa. Fulfillment center associates around the globe send customer orders from our warehouses to doorsteps. Product managers set feature requirements, strategy, and marketing messages for brand new customer experiences. And as we grow, we’ll add jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

    It’s Always Day 1
    At Amazon, it’s always “Day 1.” Now, what does this mean and why does it matter? It means that our approach remains the same as it was on Amazon’s very first day – to make smart, fast decisions, stay nimble, invent, and stay focused on delighting our customers. In our 2016 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared his thoughts on how to keep up a Day 1 company mindset. “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight,” he wrote. “A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.” You can read the full letter here

    Our Leadership Principles
    Our Leadership Principles help us keep a Day 1 mentality. They aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging. Amazonians use them, every day, whether they’re discussing ideas for new projects, deciding on the best solution for a customer’s problem, or interviewing candidates. To read through our Leadership Principles from Customer Obsession to Bias for Action, visit https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

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