Research Scientist, IPC Science

Inventory Planning and Control (IPC) science is seeking a passionate machine learning scientist working in one of its team locations (NYC, Austin or Bellevue) to build the next generation AI-driven decision making systems. IPC owns the core decision models in the space of Buying, Placement, Capacity Control and Planning. Our models decide when, where, and how much we should buy, flow, and hold inventories in our global fulfillment network to meet Amazon’s business goals and to make our customers happy. We do this for hundreds of millions of items and hundreds of product lines worth billions of dollars of world-wide for both our retail and selling partner business. Our systems are built entirely in-house and operate at various scales, from real-time decision system that completes thousands of transactions per seconds, to large scale distributed system that optimizes the inventory decisions over millions of products simultaneously. IPC is also unique in that we are simultaneously developing the science and software of inventory optimization and solving some of the hardest computational/operational challenges in production. Our team members have an opportunity to be on the forefront of supply chain thought leadership by working with some of the best product managers, scientists, and software engineers in the industry.

Key job responsibilities
This particular role focuses on building and experimenting the cutting edge technologies in deep learning and reinforcement learning to decide the inventory flows across Amazon's global fulfillment network for hundreds of millions of different products. This role requires superior logical thinkers who are able to quickly approach large ambiguous problems, turn high-level business requirements into mathematical models, identify the right solution approach, and contribute to the software development for production systems. To support their proposals, candidates should be able to independently mine and analyze data, and be able to use any necessary programming and statistical analysis software to do so. Successful candidates must thrive in fast-paced environments, which encourage collaborative and creative problem solving, be able to measure and estimate risks, constructively critique peer research, and align research focuses with the Amazon's strategic needs.

A day in the life
IPC science is at the center of Amazon’s supply chain. In this role, you will have the opportunity to work with partners and stakeholders from Amazon’s retail, selling partner and operation departments worldwide. You will understand their challenges and pain points, and help develop solutions that improve how Amazon manages inventory in our global fulfillment network. To implement your solutions, you will work closely with our in-house product and engineering teams. Your work will have high visibility and impacts to Amazon’s business operation.

About the team
IPC science team contains a large group of scientists with different technical backgrounds, who will collaborate closely with you on your projects. Our team directly supports 8 functional areas, developing and maintaining various decision optimization and prediction models behind the scene. We promote experimentation and learn by building. We often seek the opportunity of applying hybrid techniques in the space of Operations Research and Machine Learning to tackle some of our biggest technical challenges.