Applied Scientist II, Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience (GRAISE)
Key job responsibilities
Design, train, and evaluate computer vision and machine learning models for complex grocery-domain problems including product identification, shelf perception, and in-store scene understanding — iterating rapidly from prototype to production-quality solutions
Conduct rigorous exploratory data analysis to characterize domain-specific challenges (image variability, catalog gaps, label noise) and translate findings into actionable modeling decisions
Own the model development lifecycle from experimentation through deployment — collaborating with software and ML engineers to ensure models meet latency, throughput, and reliability requirements at production scale
Design and execute offline and online evaluation frameworks — defining metrics that capture both model performance and downstream business impact, and diagnosing failure modes to prioritize improvements
Build and improve data pipelines and annotation workflows that feed model training, including active learning strategies to maximize label efficiency
Communicate technical results, trade-offs, and recommendations clearly to engineering, product, and business stakeholders — connecting model behavior to customer experience outcomes
Stay current with state-of-the-art research in computer vision, multimodal learning, and representation learning — evaluating and adapting promising techniques to team-specific problems
Contribute to a culture of scientific rigor through reproducible experimentation, thorough documentation, peer code and design reviews, and raising the quality bar for the team
A day in the life
As an Applied Scientist on the GRAISE team, you'll spend your days analyzing model performance from overnight experiments, collaborating with engineers to deploy computer vision models to production, and prototyping new approaches using multimodal learning with store video and sensor data. You'll present findings to product and business stakeholders, translating technical results into actionable recommendations. Throughout the day, you'll balance rigorous scientific thinking with practical engineering constraints, knowing your work directly improves the shopping experience for millions of customers in Amazon grocery stores.
About the team
The GRAISE team (Grocery, Retail & In-Store Experience) within World Wide Grocery Store Tech (WWGST) builds foundational AI and machine learning systems that power Amazon's in-store grocery technologies. We develop domain-specific models that solve uniquely complex challenges in grocery — from smart shopping carts and inventory intelligence to personalization and store operations. Our mission is to create technology which makes grocery shopping more convenient, economical, personalized, and enjoyable for customers while empowering retailers with operational efficiency