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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