Applied Scientist II, Amazon Recommerce India

Every product a customer returns is a moment where Amazon either recovers value or writes it off — and India's ReCommerce business is on a multi-million-dollar mission to recover more of it, more intelligently, at scale. Machine learning is the core lever: predicting whether a returned unit is sellable without a human touching it, detecting damage and fraud inside sealed packaging from images, routing each unit to its highest-value disposition, and pricing recovered inventory dynamically. India's returns network is large, fast-growing, and structurally different from other geographies — a rich, high-impact environment for an Applied Scientist to build models that move real financial and customer-experience metrics.

We are hiring an Applied Scientist to build and adapt the ML that powers India ReCommerce. You will work at the intersection of two mandates: building India-first models for problems unique to our market, and adapting proven Worldwide models to India's data, catalog, and operational reality — recalibrating them where distribution, language, and process differ. You will own problems end-to-end, from framing and data through modeling, evaluation, and production deployment, partnering closely with engineering, product, and operations.

• Key job responsibilities
• Build ML models for automated returns grading — predicting the salability of returned units from structured and unstructured signals so units can be evaluated with zero or minimal human touch, improving speed, accuracy, and recovery value.

Develop computer-vision models for defect detection, condition assessment, and anomaly/fraud identification (including inside sealed packaging), and for establishing chain-of-custody and damage attribution across the returns journey.

Build disposition-prediction and routing models that direct each unit to its highest-value recovery path (resale, repair, liquidation, donation, recycle) as early as possible in the network.

Develop pricing and recovery-optimization models for liquidation and resale, moving from flat rates toward dynamic, grade- and condition-aware pricing.

Adapt Worldwide ML models to India — retraining, recalibrating, and re-evaluating for India's return distribution, catalog, languages, and operational constraints, and closing the gaps that prevent a direct lift-and-shift.

Own the full model lifecycle — problem framing, data pipelines, feature engineering, training, offline/online evaluation, monitoring, and retraining — with rigorous attention to calibration, drift, and business-metric impact.

Partner cross-functionally with engineering (to productionize), product (to frame problems and measure impact), and operations (to ground models in how the network actually runs), and use modern GenAI/LLM tooling to accelerate research and delivery.

• A day in the life
• You start by reviewing the performance of a grading model in production — checking calibration and drift against last week's returns, and confirming the recovery-value lift is holding. Mid-morning, you dig into a computer-vision problem: improving detection of a damage type that's driving write-offs, using images captured across the returns journey. In the afternoon you work with a Worldwide science team to bring one of their models to India — scoping what retraining and recalibration India's data requires — then pair with an engineer to move your latest model toward production behind a clean evaluation gate. You close by framing a new problem with a product partner: quantifying the opportunity, defining the label and success metric, and sketching the modeling approach.

• About the team
• India ReCommerce owns the systems and science that turn returned and unsellable inventory into recovered value and a better customer experience. You will join a team building an increasingly automated, ML-driven returns network — leveraging Worldwide platforms where they fit and building India-first capabilities where they don't. It is a high-ownership environment with a direct line from your models to measurable business and customer outcomes.

Basic qualifications

• - 3+ years of building models for business application experience
• - PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
• - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
• - Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing

Preferred qualifications

• - Experience using Unix/Linux
• - Experience in professional software development

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