Applied Scientist II

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Who We Are and What We Do: Amazon.com and its subsidiaries are leaders in the online retail industry, enabling customers worldwide to purchase millions of unique items. The Advertising team is specifically chartered with the responsibility of marketing our products, and to drive traffic to Amazon to increase sales. As Amazon.com seeks to increase its presence in many countries with different customer behaviors, and as mobile and tablets explode, one of our biggest challenges is to increase the awareness of our product selection and price to customers in a variety of ways, and to make us the premier online shopping destination, including on Mobile devices.
We use several advertising channels to be able to bring customers to Amazon. One of the major forms of advertising is by placing advertisements for Amazon on 3rd Party sites (Publishers). We have millions of such Publishers in our network, driving billions of dollars in sales for Amazon. We also use these websites to show ads for other companies, and keep a portion of the revenue from these companies as our take, like AdSense. We have systems that are able to monitor customer behavior on Amazon.com and on other websites, correlate purchases and browsing history on the internet, and come up with intelligent advertising campaigns that would maximize the benefit to Amazon, the Advertisers and Publishers. We do this by calculating the probability of a customer making a purchase because of an advertisement, the cost of showing that advertisement, and make a data based decision on what advertisement is best to surface.
We own products that allow anyone to be able to sign-up as a Publisher in our network. Our external facing portal allows these Publishers to access a number of products that monetize different portions of their website content. We treat mobile app developers as Publishers, and are also in the business of showing Mobile ads, and making money off of those. Publishers can include snippets of Javascript in their site, and Developers can integrate with our Mobile Ads SDK, and they are done. When a potential customer views the website or uses an app, web service calls are made to our systems, which then decide which advertisement to show, and provide it back to the app or website. We mine the large amounts of customer behavior data, and website content to determine the best ad to show. When the customer clicks on that ad, he/she gets redirected to Amazon or to the advertiser site. We have systems that monitor the customer actions as they make purchases, and we initiate payment to the Publisher or Developer for enabling the transaction. We have Software Development Kits (SDK) for mobile app developers on Android and iOS that help them to easily create links to products on Amazon. We have mobile device oriented offerings that help publishers and app developers monetize from mobile traffic.
In other words, you will be working on products and solutions that enable us to place highly effective advertisements on a variety of Publishing sources – websites, Mobile apps, Tablet apps, gaming devices, TVs etc. You will be competing in a cutting edge space with other Advertising giants like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and a Microsoft with your products, and have tremendous business impact.

Major responsibilities
· Use machine learning, data mining and statistical techniques to create new, scalable solutions for business problems
· Analyze and extract relevant information from large amounts of Amazon's historical business data to help automate and optimize key processes
· Design, develop and evaluate highly innovative models for predictive learning
· Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large scale data analyses, model development, model validation and model implementation
· Research and implement novel machine learning and statistical approaches

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

Basic Qualifications
· MS/Ph.D in CS, Machine Learning, Operational research, Statistics or in a highly quantitative field. PhD strongly preferred.
· 3+ years of industrial experience in predictive modeling and analysis, predictive software development
· Strong Problem solving ability
· Good skills with Java or C++, Perl/Python (or similar scripting language)
· Experience in using R, Matlab, or any other statistical software
· Experience in computational Advertising and large scale ML application for retail or Ads optimization a big plus.
· Experience in mentoring junior team members, and guiding them on machine learning and data modeling applications
· Strong communication and data analysis skills