Sr. Technical Program Manager Amazon
Berkeley, CA

Job Description

Amazon is the 4th most popular site in the US (source:

http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US). Our product search engine,

one of the most heavily used services in the world, indexes billions of

products and serves hundreds of millions of customers world-wide. We are working on a new initiative to transform our search engine into a

shopping engine that assists customers with their shopping

missions. We're looking at every aspect of search, from query

understanding to front-end UX, ranking and relevance, indexing and

tiering and asking how we can make big, step improvements by applying

advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) techniques. This is a rare opportunity to lead programs that develop cutting edge ML solutions and apply them to a search problem of this magnitude. Some exciting questions that we expect to answer over the next few years include:

* Can we deeply understand customer intent and personalize their search

experience even when they type broad queries such as "dress" or

"espresso machine"?

* Can we reduce the cost of serving customer queries on Amazon by two

orders of magnitude using ML to predict n-grams and tuples that many

queries decompose into, apply expensive ranking functions offline to

identify the most relevant products that match these terms, and index

these for efficient online retrieval? We expect this to lead to exciting

research at the intersection of systems and ML.

* Can we deeply understand the catalog to surface products that offer

the most value to a customer? The challenge here is that the definition

of value is subjective and personal, and therefore requires a deeper

understanding of the customers intent as well as preferences.

* Can we increase the experimental velocity of Customer Experience (CX) experiments by two orders of magnitude? Achieving this will enable us to rapidly try various CX treatments, and contextualize the CX based on factors such as customer intent and device.
* Can we use deep learning to transfer behavioral signals from

frequently purchased products in the head to products in the tail where

behavioral signals are sparse? The challenge here is the scale, and the

fact that the head and torso contain only a small fraction of products

while the tail contains an overwhelmingly large fraction of the products

in the catalog.

As a Technical Program Manager, you will own the execution of strategic programs and help our applied science and engineering teams define, build and ship search solutions. You will play a pivotal role in managing projects at all stages - inception, design, development, deployment and subsequent improvements. You will tackle challenging problems and coordinate high profile projects (across multiple teams) to ensure our goals are met. You will interface with other technology teams Amazon.