Principal Research Scientist Amazon
Seattle, WA

Job Description

Inventory Placement is seeking a Principal Research Scientist to join its science team. We own the systems that decide where to place hundreds of millions of units worth billions of dollars of inventory a week, globally, shaping Amazon's cost structures and value proposition to the customer and ultimately maximizing Amazon's long term free cash flow. Our systems are built entirely in-house, and are on the cutting edge of automated large scale supply chain planning, optimization, execution and simulation technology. We are simultaneously pushing the frontier of the science of supply chain planning for new and old business use-cases and solving some of the toughest computational challenges. We are responsible for studying, designing, and building systems to suit Amazon's needs and do not rely on existing off-the-self planning solutions. Our team members are on the forefront of supply chain thought leadership by working on the most challenging problems in the industry with some of the best minds in the business and academia.

The successful candidate has solid research experience in Operations Research preferably with focus on Operations Management or other closely related areas. He or she will lead the research where we are responsible for developing solutions to better manage and optimize worldwide inventory placement, while providing the best experience to our customers through speed at the lowest possible cost. The research team is responsible for quantitative data analysis, building models and prototypes for supply chain systems, and developing state-of-the-art optimization algorithms that can scale for hundreds of millions of products. Scientists on the team closely collaborate with simulation and statistical testing platforms to jointly drive optimal decision making across different functions. This team plays a significant role in various stages of the innovation pipeline from identifying business needs, developing new algorithms, prototyping/simulation, to implementation by working closely with colleagues in engineering, product management, operations, retail and finance.

As a senior member of the research team, you will play an integral part in Amazon's inventory planning platform with the following technical and leadership responsibilities:

Interact with engineering, operations, science and business teams to develop an understanding and domain knowledge of processes, system structures, and business requirements

Apply domain knowledge and business judgment to identify opportunities and quantify the impact aligning research direction to business requirements and make the right judgment on research project prioritization

Develop scalable mathematical models to derive optimal or near-optimal solutions to existing and new inventory planning challenges

Create prototypes and simulations to test devised solutions

Advocate technical solutions to business stakeholders, engineering teams, as well as executive level decision makers

Work closely with engineers to integrate prototypes into production systems

Create policy evaluation methods to track the actual performance of devised solutions in production systems, identify areas with potential for improvement and work with internal teams to improve the solution with new features

Mentor team members for their career development and growth

Excel in evaluating the skill sets of candidates to make successful hiring decisions to meet business needs