Data Scientist, Amazon Advertising Business Intelligence

Key Skills

A/B Testing, Amazon EMR, Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache Pig, Design, Elasticsearch, Java Programming, Large scale data processing, Machine learning techniques, Mathematics, Python Programming, R Programming, Scala Programming, SPARK Programming, SQL, Statistics

Job Description

Amazon Advertising is one of Amazon's fastest growing and most profitable businesses, responsible for defining and delivering a collection of advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products and solutions are strategically important to enable our Retail and Marketplace businesses to drive long-term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks and break fresh ground in product and technical innovations every day!

The Advertising Modeling, Optimization and Data Science team enhances Advertising teams’ decision-making by providing an exhaustive suite of analytics and automation products, and by extracting meaning from Amazon Advertising’s global operations. We own and operate a large-scale AWS-based data infrastructure that acts as a pivot to Worldwide operations, enabling critical downstream applications in ad management, design, billing, as well as customer feedback, software infrastructure, and more. The team consists of Business Intelligence Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers, who work together to improve our Advertisers' and Shoppers' experience with Amazon Advertising by accompanying and supporting the analytical needs of our partner teams.

This Data Scientist will be an expert in the areas of data science, machine learning and statistics, having hands-on experience with multiple improvement initiatives as well as balancing technical and business judgment to make the right decisions about technology, models and methodologies. The job will own and drive a new and ambiguous space – how do we leverage advanced analytics and machine learning to find areas of business opportunity from direct customer feedback to elevate customer’s experience with advertising? This will require analyzing very large data sets, diving deep to identify business insights and opportunities, designing simulations and experiments, developing statistical and ML models by tailoring to business needs, and collaborating with Scientists, Engineers, Business Intelligence Engineers, and Product Managers. The successful candidate will exemplify bias for action needed in a startup environment.

As a Data Scientist on this team, you will:

• Solve real-world problems by getting and analyzing large amounts of data, diving deep to identify business insights and opportunities, design simulations and experiments, developing statistical and ML models by tailoring to business needs, and collaborating with Scientists, Engineers, BIE's, and Product Managers.
• Write code (Python, R, Scala, SQL, etc.) to obtain, manipulate, and analyze data
• Apply statistical and machine learning knowledge to specific business problems and data.
• Build decision-making models and propose solution for the business problem you define.
• 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 optimal decision making.
• Formalize assumptions about how our systems are expected to work, create statistical definition of the outlier, and develop methods to systematically identify 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.
• Conduct written and verbal presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication.

Why you will love this opportunity:

Amazon has invested heavily in building a world-class advertising business. This team defines and delivers 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 a 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 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.

About the team

The Advertising Modeling, Optimization and Data Science team enhances Advertising teams’ decision-making by providing an exhaustive suite of analytics and automation products, and by extracting meaning from Amazon Advertising’s global operations. We own and operate a large-scale AWS-based data infrastructure that acts as a pivot to Worldwide operations, enabling critical downstream applications in ad management, design, billing, as well as customer feedback, software infrastructure, and more. The team consists of Business Intelligence Engineers, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers, who work together to improve our Advertisers' and Shoppers' experience with Amazon Advertising by accompanying and supporting the analytical needs of our partner teams.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Masters degree in Statistics, Applied Math, Operations Research, Economics, or a related quantitative field

• 5+ years professional experience in modeling and statistical analysis of large datasets
• Proven experience in working with databases and SQL in a business environment
• Experience in solving common statistical problems such as classification, regression, and clustering analysis, etc.
• Experience in experiment design (A/B Testing).
• Experience developing experimental and analytical plans for data modeling, use effective baselines, and accurately determine cause-and-effect relations.
• Experience in as many of the following areas: causal inferencing, multi-variate testing & design, A/B testing & design, descriptive analytics, and regression analysis.
• Good understanding of supervised and unsupervised machine learning models.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, or related quantitative field.
• Broad knowledge of ML methods, statistical analysis, and problem-solving skills.
• Expert level knowledge in statistics and sophisticated user of statistical tools.
• Experience in EMR, Spark, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, Pig, and Hive.
• Experience processing, filtering, and presenting large data sets (hundreds of millions/billions of rows).
• Deep technical skills and business sense, to interface with all levels and disciplines.
• 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 advocate technical solutions for science, engineering, and business audiences.
• Ability to convey rigorous mathematical concepts and considerations to non-expert audience.
• Ability to work backwards from customer needs, and distill informal customer requirements into problem definitions, dealing with ambiguity and competing objectives.
• Very good analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to use data and metrics to back up assumptions, recommendations and drive actions.
• Experience in computational advertising is a plus.