The Role

We are looking for a Senior Applied Scientist to build the predictive intelligence powering capacity management for our workspace platform - developing machine learning systems that forecast demand, optimize resource allocation, and enable cost-efficient scaling at massive scale.

This role requires someone who can translate complex business requirements into production ML systems, designing algorithms that balance customer experience with operational efficiency across a large and diverse fleet of capacity pools.

What You'll Do
• Architect and implement ML foundations for capacity management, building models that continuously learn and optimize across multiple dimensions including geography, platform, and instance type.
• Develop demand forecasting systems that anticipate usage patterns hours to weeks in advance, enabling proactive capacity decisions at scale.
• Build anomaly detection systems that identify capacity risks before they impact customers, improving service reliability and resilience.
• Design optimization algorithms that make high-frequency, automated decisions balancing two critical forces: ensuring a flawless customer experience where every operation succeeds, while maximizing cost efficiency through intelligent resource utilization and placement strategies.
• Apply advanced ML techniques including time-series forecasting, reinforcement learning, and causal inference to measure the true impact of capacity decisions on customer experience and cost.
• Engineer features from large-scale datasets spanning usage signals, session patterns, and infrastructure telemetry - capturing complex interactions across diverse workload types.
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to translate product vision into scientific solutions, deploying models that process millions of predictions daily with sub-second latency requirements.

What Success Looks Like
• ML systems that enable the service to remain profitable while capacity-related customer impacts become increasingly rare.
• Measurable business impact through reduced capacity waste, improved cost efficiency, and elimination of customer-impacting capacity events.
• Scientific innovation that unlocks significant cost savings through predictive resource commitment strategies and intelligent automated decision-making.
• Models that maintain the safety margins needed to absorb demand volatility without customer impact.
• An ML foundation that enables distributed, autonomous decision-making while maintaining consistent quality at scale.

What We're Looking For
• Deep expertise in machine learning, with hands-on experience building and deploying production ML systems.
• Strong background in time-series forecasting and handling demand volatility across diverse workload patterns.
• Experience with reinforcement learning for dynamic resource allocation and causal inference for impact measurement.
• Ability to work with large-scale datasets and engineer features that capture complex, multi-dimensional interactions.
• Strong systems thinking - able to design end-to-end ML pipelines that operate reliably at scale with low-latency requirements.
• Excellent collaboration skills - comfortable partnering with product managers, engineers, and business stakeholders to drive scientific solutions from concept to production.
• A track record of measurable business impact through applied ML research and deployment.

Key job responsibilities

1/ Work independently on ambiguous problems: Independently work on capacity forecasting problems that are not well defined or structured, identifying and framing new research challenges associated with broad problem areas, delivering with limited guidance.

2/ Influence across multiple teams: Drive alignment on ML approaches and capacity strategies across product, engineering, and operations teams. Actively mentor and develop others on the team.

3/ Deliver end-to-end production solutions: Develop and deliver complete solutions including scientific contributions that are deployed in production. Make technical trade-offs balancing long-term invention with short-term delivery

Lead on medium-to-large business problems: Take the lead on capacity management challenges that deliver significant benefits to customers and the business through improved forecasting accuracy and cost optimization.

4/ Drive team scientific agenda: Shape the direction of ML research for capacity management, proposing new approaches and securing buy-in from leadership.

5/ Set the example: Your solutions, code, designs, and scientific artifacts should set a great example to others.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

- 3+ years of building machine learning models for business application experience

- PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience

- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language

- Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Experience with modeling tools such as R, scikit-learn, Spark MLLib, MxNet, Tensorflow, numpy, scipy etc.

- Experience with large scale distributed systems such as Hadoop, Spark etc.

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 - 167,100.00 - 226,100.00 USD annually