The role
From Amazon's own posting.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service that enables sellers to outsource supply chain and fulfillment to Amazon and use Amazon's world-class science, technology, and logistics infrastructure to deliver billions of products from manufacturing hubs to customers worldwide with fast delivery promise. As FBA expands into end-to-end supply chain and fulfillment management, the science problems are growing in complexity and strategic importance. The FBA organization is looking for a Principal Applied Scientist with deep expertise in Operations Research, Reinforcement Learning, and strong modeling and analytical skills to join our cross-domain group of applied scientists, research scientists, economists, and data scientists building the intelligence layer for FBA's supply chain.
As a lead Principal Applied Scientist, you will own the science strategy and execution for the optimization algorithms that power FBA's supply chain, spanning the full journey from the moment a seller procures product at origin, through upstream warehousing and distribution, and into Amazon's fulfillment network. Working with a team of scientists, your technical challenges will span product selection optimization for capacity-constrained speed nodes, balancing demand coverage, profitability, and speed sensitivity across hundreds of sites; multi-echelon inventory optimization across a tiered architecture spanning origin-country warehousing, destination-country distribution centers, and regional fulfillment centers; auction mechanisms that allocate scarce capacity to sellers efficiently; seller recommendation systems that deliver explainable, economically quantified guidance; and adoption of frontier AI approaches to accelerate science delivery across the team. Your work will directly shape how millions of products flow from factory floor to customer door for millions of sellers, and your algorithms will determine the economic viability of Amazon's fastest-growing fulfillment investments.
We are looking for a seasoned scientist who brings rigorous operations research thinking to large-scale supply chain problems, and who thrives in the ambiguity of defining the roadmap rather than receiving it. The problems above also draw on reinforcement learning for sequential, non-stationary decisions; machine learning for the prediction and estimation layer; and mechanism design for incentive design and auctions. Beyond individual contribution, you will set the long-term technical vision across work streams, influence product managers, engineers, scientists, and senior leaders on high-judgment decisions, and mentor junior scientists. We value deeply technical people who deliver results incrementally and frequently in a fast-paced, high-energy environment, and who are eager to learn new areas and develop themselves and their colleagues.
Key job responsibilities
- Own the science strategy and development of inventory routing, replenishment, product selection, mechanism design, and transportation distribution algorithms that power FBA's supply chain across Amazon's fulfillment network.
- Design and implement large-scale optimization algorithms and incentive-compatible mechanisms for marketplace challenges, including auction design and pricing strategies.
- Partner with Product Managers and Software Engineers to translate ambiguous business challenges into well-scoped science initiatives, and build and deploy production-grade solutions that operate reliably at scale across a network serving millions of sellers.
- Influence senior leaders on technical and business direction, identify and propose new science investment areas, and represent the science perspective across organizations.
- Mentor and develop junior scientists, raise the technical bar for the broader science community, and drive adoption of emerging research methods across the team.
A day in the life
In this role, you will be a technical leader in operations research and optimization with significant scope, impact, and high visibility. Your solutions will lead to billions of dollars of impact on either the topline or the bottom line of Amazon's third-party seller business. You will work closely with Product Managers, Software Engineers, and other Scientists to deeply understand FBA seller business problems and priorities. You will design and launch new systems, solving real-world inventory, transportation, replenishment, pricing, and mechanism design problems with millions of unique products involving hundreds of thousands of Selling Partners and tens of millions of customers around the world. As a scientist on the team, you will be involved in every aspect of the process — from idea generation, business analysis, and scientific research, through to development and deployment of production-grade optimization models — giving you a real sense of ownership. You are expected to make decisions about methodology, model architecture, and technology choices, striving for simplicity and judgment backed by mathematical rigor. You will also collaborate with the broader decision and research science community at Amazon to broaden the horizon of your work and mentor scientists.
About the team
Sellers play a vital role in Amazon’s ecosystem, integral to our mission of offering the Earth’s largest selection, lowest prices, and fastest delivery speed. FBA is an optional service that enables third-party sellers to outsource order fulfillment to Amazon, and leverage Amazon’s world-class facilities to provide customers fast delivery promise. With commitment to taking on even more of the supply chain and operational complexities on behalf of our selling partners, Amazon now provides an end-to-end suite of supply chain and fulfillment services. This comprehensive solution empowers sellers to reliably transport products from manufacturing sites to customers worldwide. The FBA team is the core group in charge of warehousing, inventory management, fulfillment and pricing, and a diverse range of recommendation services for sellers, as well as building the internal resource management systems. We work to learn seller behavior, understand seller experience, recommend right actions to sellers, design seller policies and incentives, and develop science products and services that empower sellers to grow their businesses. To do so, we build and innovate science solutions that leverage the right tools across different fields including operations research, economics, machine learning, statistics, and data analytics. Our culture is centered on rapid prototyping, rigorous experimentation, and data-driven decision-making.
We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations: Bellevue, WA, or Sunnyvale, CA.
- PhD, or Master's degree and 10+ years of applied research experience
- Experience with supply chain optimization, demand forecasting, inventory management, or transportation/logistics algorithms.
- Strength in mechanism design, auction theory, or game theory, particularly in settings involving strategic agents, capacity allocation, or market-based resource allocation.
- Experience with reinforcement learning applied to sequential decision-making in operations or supply chain contexts.
- Experience with product selection or assortment optimization for capacity-constrained systems.
- Proven ability to influence senior leadership and drive alignment across multiple organizations.
- Track record of translating ambiguous business problems into well-defined science solutions with measurable impact.
- Proven ability to work effectively across product, engineering, and science teams.
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