Amazon
Barcelona, Catalonia, ESP
How does Amazon decide which fulfillment center ships your order, which truck carries it, and how to keep promises across hundreds of millions of packages daily? How does it decide how many trucks and how much labor are required to ship orders across the network?
SCOT Fulfillment Optimization (FO) owns the optimization and forecasting science behind these decisions.
We are seeking Applied Scientists to join the FO Science & Tech team in Barcelona (alternatively: Luxembourg or London) with a strong academic background in optimization, machine learning, and/or time-series forecasting.
• You will design and build state-of-the-art machine learning and optimization models that power Amazon's fulfillment decisions at an unprecedented scale across two core scientific pillars:
• Large-Scale Optimization and Planning: Designing planning systems for order assignment and resource utilization, while balancing multi-objective cost-speed tradeoffs to enable controllers to steer millions of shipments per hour optimally.
• Demand Forecasting & Predictive ML: Developing time-series forecasts for customer demand, incorporating contextual information (weather, sales, order properties), and modeling uncertainty for core planning systems.
Basic qualifications
• PhD in Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• Strong programming skills (Python preferred; experience with optimization solvers a plus)
• Research experience in one or more:
• Large-scale mathematical programming (LP, MIP, decomposition methods)
• Combinatorial optimization (assignment, scheduling, network flows)
• Multi-objective optimization and control
• Large-scale time-series forecasting (GenAI models, probabilistic forecasting, uncertainty quantification)
• Causal inference (spatiotemporal causal modeling, offline policy evaluation)
Preferred qualifications
• Experience building optimization systems that run in production at scale
• Being comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration cycles
• Publications in relevant venues
Key job responsibilities
Design and implement optimization and forecasting models for large-scale fulfillment problems, from order assignment to network flow control. Build research prototypes end-to-end: from problem formulation through scalable implementation to production validation. Analyse complex tradeoffs (cost, speed, capacity, accuracy) and translate findings into actionable recommendations for leadership and operations teams. Collaborate with engineers to bring science solutions into production systems serving millions of customer orders daily.
A day in the life
You formulate an optimization or forecasting problem on a whiteboard with teammates, then prototype it in Python with real data by the afternoon. You run experiments against production-scale datasets, iterate on the model, and present results to stakeholders who will use them to make network decisions next week. Some days you dive deep into solver performance; other days you're explaining a Pareto frontier to an operations leader. You collaborate with large engineering and product teams to bring your solutions into systems serving millions of customers. Alongside fast-turnaround prototypes, you own long-term research bets, the kind that reshape how Amazon's fulfillment network operates at scale. Your work goes live.
About the team
SCOT Fulfillment Optimization Science & Tech (FO SnT) is the applied research team behind Amazon's fulfillment decision-making systems. We decide how orders get assigned to warehouses, how capacity is allocated across the network, and how cost and speed tradeoffs are managed in real time, at global scale. Our models influence billions of euros in annual operational spend. They protect sites from overload during peak, reduce transportation costs and CO2 emissions, and ensure customers receive their packages when promised. Leadership relies on our science to make investment decisions worth hundreds of millions. We are practitioners of large-scale optimization: MIP formulations, decomposition methods, approximation algorithms, and parallelisation. We use machine learning where it sharpens our decisions, including forecasting, learned heuristics, and multi-armed bandits. We pick the right tool for the problem, not the fashionable one. You will work alongside Senior and Principal scientists, and collaborate with Amazon Scholars and academic partners who bring frontier research into our applied problems. We code our prototypes to be production-ready and collaborate with large engineering teams to ship systems, not papers. Above all, we have fun solving hard real-world problems at real-world speed, failing, learning, and shipping along the way.
PhD, or a Master's degree and experience in CS, CE, ML or related field
Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
Experience in building models for business application
Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing
Experience using Unix/Linux
Experience in professional software development
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