Applied Scientist - Forecasting Amazon
Seattle, WA

Job Description

Amazon's Transportation Technology division, builds the complex software solutions that are needed to work across our vendors, warehouses and carriers to optimize both time & cost of getting the packages delivered. It's no secret that Amazon relies on its technology to deliver millions of packages every day to its customers - on time, with low cost. That said, this is a multi-billion-dollar business, and our technical journey has only started. We are looking to build brand new systems that use our vast collection of data to optimize the delivery algorithms - and make a big impact on Amazon's business costs. If you find this space interesting, Transportation Forecasting Technology team might be the right fit for you.

What do we do?

The first step in ensuring we can figure out an optimal solution to ship all our packages is knowing the data for the problem well in advance. Yes - forecasting! Our team's vision is to build systems that analyze forecast how many packages will flow through the entire Amazon transportation network - from our vendors into our warehouses, out of our warehouses to our customers, between our warehouses. Constantly measuring & ensuring the accuracy of forecast is also critical given the whole transportation plan (and thus billions of dollars of expense) are impacted by this crucial piece of data. This is easier said than done. From figuring out how to collect the right data from various systems, to designing systems on how to quickly process this data, to developing machine-learning algorithms to use this data - and a multitude of other factors - into predicting what the future demand will look like, to constantly measuring & improving the accuracy of our algorithms … well, you get the idea … it is a tough nut to crack. And that's why we are building a brand new team to solve this, and need smart and passionate scientists such as you to join in the effort

What will you do?

As an Applied Scientist, you will be responsible for understanding and mining the large amount of data, and come up with recommendations that will help improve the accuracy. You will work with the engineers to drive implementation of the proposed models. You will also be responsible to establish a testing strategy to validate the models before they get applied for Production use. You will also work with distributed machine learning and statistical algorithms across multiple platforms including AWS. A big business impact will be for you, and the team, to create new forecasting & optimization models to reduce the overall transportation cost. Finally, this being a new team, you will have lots of opportunities to help build & strengthen the team via mentoring, hiring & training.