Sr. Technical Program Manager

Job description

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.

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
· At least 5 years of experience working in a software development organization that builds large-scale distributed systems.
· At least 5 years of recent experience as a Technical Project Manager, Technical Program Manager, Technical Product manager, or Technical Lead.
· At least 3 years of recent domain experience in and/or direct exposure to any of the following: Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Search, ecommerce.