Senior Data Scientist

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses. Amazon's advertising portfolio helps merchants, retail vendors, and brand owners succeed via native advertising, which grows incremental sales of their products sold through Amazon. The primary goals are to help shoppers discover new products they love, be the most efficient way for advertisers to meet their business objectives, and build a sustainable business that continuously innovates on behalf of customers. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth.

This opportunity is for the Advertising Forecasting Science team, which consists of scientists and engineers based in Palo Alto, California. The team builds forecasting models for advertising campaigns and financial planning, with revenue exceeding tens of billions of dollars. In addition, the forecasting science team makes auction prediction and handles bid optimization for billions of requests per day, impacting the company’s performance directly using advanced Machine Learning algorithms.

Senior Data Scientist (technical leader) on this team you will:
· Translate business questions and concerns into specific quantitative questions that can be answered with available data using sound methodologies. In cases where questions cannot be answered with available data, work with engineers to produce the required data.
· Lead Data Science solutions from beginning to end.
· Deliver with independence on challenging large scale problems with ambiguity.
· Manage and drive the technical and analytical aspects of Advertiser segmentation; continually advance approach and methods.
· Retrieve, synthesize, and present critical data in a format that is immediately useful to answering specific questions or improving system performance.
· Analyze historical data to identify trends and support decision making.
· Improve upon existing methodologies by developing new data sources, testing model enhancements, and fine-tuning model parameters.
· Provide requirements to develop analytic capabilities, platforms, and pipelines.
· Apply statistical or machine learning knowledge to specific business problems and data.
· Formalize assumptions about how our systems are expected to work, create statistical definition of the outlier, and develop methods to systematically identify these outliers. Work out why such examples are outliers and define if any actions needed.
· Given anecdotes about anomalies or generate automatic scripts to define anomalies, deep dive to explain why they happen, and identify fixes.
· Build decision-making models and propose solution for the business problem you defined
· Conduct written and verbal presentation to share insights and recommendations to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication.
· Utilize code (python or another object oriented language) for data analyzing and modeling algorithms.

Why you love this opportunity
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team is responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our solutions generate billions in revenue and drive long-term growth for Amazon’s Retail and Marketplace businesses. We deliver billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks daily, and break fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative, and fun-loving team with an entrepreneurial spirit - with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate.

Impact and Career Growth
You will invent new experiences and influence customer-facing shopping experiences to help suppliers grow their retail business and the auction dynamics that leverage native advertising; this is your opportunity to work within the fastest-growing businesses across all of Amazon! Define a long-term science vision for our advertising business, driven fundamentally from our customers' needs, translating that direction into specific plans for research and applied scientists, as well as engineering and product teams. This role combines science leadership, organizational ability, technical strength, product focus, and business understanding.

Team video https://youtu.be/zD_6Lzw8raE

Basic Qualifications

· Bachelor's Degree
· 5+ years of experience with data scripting languages (e.g SQL, Python, R etc.) or statistical/mathematical software (e.g. R, SAS, or Matlab)
· 4+ years working as a Data Scientist

Preferred Qualifications

· Lead Data Science solutions from beginning to end.
· Experience in measurement problems, A/B testing and functional areas such as causal learning, multi-variate testing, etc.
· Experience in data applications using large scale distributed systems (e.g. EMR, Spark, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Pig, and Hive).
· Depth and breadth in quantitative knowledge.
· Excellent quantitative modeling, strong knowledge of ML methods, statistical analysis, and problem-solving skills. Sophisticated user of statistical tools.
· Experience processing, filtering, and presenting large quantities (Millions to Billions of rows) of data
· Combination of deep technical skills and business savvy enough to interface with all levels and disciplines within our customer’s organization.
· Demonstrable track record of dealing well with ambiguity, prioritizing needs, and delivering results in a dynamic environment.
· Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to effectively advocate technical solutions to research scientists, engineering teams and business audiences.
· Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations.
· Demonstrable track record of dealing well with ambiguity, prioritizing needs, and delivering results in a dynamic environment.
· Experience in advertising is a plus.

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us