Economist

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Prime Video is an industry leading, high-growth business and a critical driver of Amazon Prime subscriptions, which contribute to customer loyalty and lifetime value. Prime Video is used daily by a massive audience on Amazon's websites and through a variety of devices including the Kindle Fire, game consoles, smart TVs and Blu-ray players. Prime Video is a digital video streaming and download service that offers Amazon customers the ability to rent, purchase or subscribe to a huge catalog of videos. Movies range from new releases to classic favorites, and Prime Video offers major television episodes, entire seasons, or even day after air TV.

The Prime Video Analytics team uses machine learning, econometrics, and data science to optimize Amazon’s streaming-video catalogue, driving customer engagement and Prime member acquisition. We generate insights to guide Amazon’s digital-video strategy, and we provide direct support to the content-acquisition process. We use detailed customer behavioral data (e.g. streaming history) and detailed information about content to predict and understand what customers like to watch.

We are looking for a Senior Economist to build innovative systems for classifying content and predicting customers’ response to individual titles. For example, we need to predict the performance of titles based on incomplete information. Key responsibilities of the Prime Video Sr. Economist include the following:
· Optimizing the digital video catalog to improve customer experience and grow the Amazon business
· Determining statistically significant control groups for experimentation
· Improving model usability by analyzing customer behavior and by gathering requirements from business owners and other tech teams. Incorporating new data sources and implementing creative methodology innovations to improve model performance
· Creating and tracking accuracy and performance metrics
· Helping build production systems that take inputs from multiple models and support decision making
· Mentoring junior members to improve their understanding and application of econometric techniques

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· Applicants with considerably more experience, including mid-career, are also strongly encouraged
· Strong background in statistics methodology, applications to business problems, and/or big data
· Ability to work in a fast-paced business environment
· Strong research track record
· Effective verbal and written communications skills

Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· PhD in Economics
· 3-5 or more years of experience in industry, consulting, government or academic research
· Strong causal estimation based on observational data
· Strong technical communication to non-technical audience
· Experience in optimization and microeconomic modeling
· Experience working with very large real-world data sets and building scalable models from big data
· Expertise in SQL and a programmatic scripting language for analysis (e.g. Python / R)