Applied Scientist II, Prime Video - Ads Science

Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads.

Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience.

As a Prime Video team member, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people.

We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you!

Key job responsibilities

The science challenges include:

• Heterogeneous customer responses. The same customer responds differently to ads depending on what they’re watching, how engaged they are, and their broader streaming context. We need to understand and predict this variation to make better advertising decisions in real time.
• Signal sparsity in streaming. Unlike search or retail advertising, streaming offers no clicks, no conversions, and limited direct feedback. We must develop creative approaches to infer customer preferences, intent, and tolerance from indirect behavioral signals.
• Personalization at scale. A one-size-fits-all ad experience leaves value on the table for both customers and the business. We build systems that adapt ad load, placement, and content to individual viewers across 100M+ customers and 100k+ titles.
• Small effects, large variance. Ad interventions typically produce 0.1-2% shifts in engagement, effects easily overwhelmed by natural behavioral variance. Measuring, attributing, and optimizing these small signals requires rigorous experimental design and causal methodologies.
• Competing objectives. Revenue, customer engagement, long-term retention, and advertiser value are in tension. We develop principled frameworks to navigate these tradeoffs and optimize for sustainable outcomes rather than any single metric.

A day in the life

• Contribute to the research and development of ML models that personalize advertising decisions for 100M+ customers across 100k+ titles, with production deployment in mind
• Develop deep learning architectures (multi-task learning, embedding-based representations) for customer behavior prediction at scale
• Design and analyze large-scale A/B experiments, applying causal inference techniques to measure and optimize the impact of ad strategies on customer engagement and monetization
• Partner with engineering to ensure models meet production latency and scalability requirements
• Collaborate with product managers to frame business problems as tractable ML problems and translate findings into product decisions
• Shape the team’s scientific roadmap, identifying high-impact research directions

About the team

Prime Video Ads is pioneering the use of Generative AI, Deep Learning and Causal ML to empower the next generation of Ads experience in Prime Video. Our vision is to build the world’s most valuable and differentiated ad-supported streaming platform: one where every ad is relevant to the viewer, and every dollar spent by an advertiser delivers measurable results. We are seeking lead applied scientists who have demonstrated experience in advancing state of the art ML algorithms, particularly in Personalization, Relevance, Casual Inference and Gen-AI areas. Your role will be to deliver these innovations as production-ready systems at Amazon scale.

Basic Qualifications

• 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 programming in Java, C++, Python or related language

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application
• Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
• Experience with programming languages such as Python, Java, C++

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, WA, SEATTLE - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually