Principal Economist, Economics & Growth | Rufus

Join us at Amazon as we reinvent shopping again! We're not just talking about improving the existing Amazon shopping experiences, we're building a brand-new world where shopping is effortless and intuitive through the power of generative AI. Leveraging state-of-the-art Large Language Models and generative AI, we're creating a live, two-way natural language conversational experience that is fast, helpful and trustworthy.

As people turn to Amazon for deeper insights and understanding about products earlier and earlier in their shopping journeys, we're stepping up to the challenge by synthesizing complex information and multiple perspectives so customers can explore Amazon’s vast catalog to find exactly the products that solve their particular needs. Imagine having a back and forth conversation with an AI assistant helping you to articulate a problem you’re trying solve, effortlessly answering your product questions and giving you trustworthy advice and recommendations for what to buy. Also imagine a world where this same AI assistant reduces your mental load by proactively predicting and then fulfilling your shopping needs without you needing to interfere, thus saving you time and money along the way. We are building such an AI assistant to become the digital manifestation of the helpful salesperson that asks customers what they need, helps them navigate the store, waits unobtrusively while they look over the shelves, and helps them find complementary goods. What does economics have to teach this salesperson? Can we embed lessons from the behavioral literature to help customers? This is an opportunity to embed economic expertise into large scale generative models. This is just the beginning, and the future is yours to shape.

We're searching for pioneers who are passionate about using technology and innovation to fundamentally change how customers shop, and who are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry and even disrupting how Amazon serves customers. You'll be a senior technical leader working with talented scientists, economists, engineers, and product leaders to innovate on behalf of our customers and help turn generative AI shopping into Amazon’s next business pillar.

Key job responsibilities
As the Principal Economist in the Shopping Economics team, you are a senior member of the technical leadership team, working with executives, principal engineers and scietists, and senior product leaders. Your economic thought leadership helps us to build new-to-world customer experiences that solve important problems for customers while creating new business models, ensuring Amazon is optimizing its innovation portfolio to maximally help customers solve their shopping problems. Solving problems like improving the match quality between customers’ heterogeneous needs and Amazon’s nearly infinite selection, articulating the economics of advertising in a conversation, using insights from economics to better align the LLM, and using deep learning techniques to measure substitution patterns and the economic value of engagement. You work with economists, scientists, and engineers Amazon-wide to rethink systems across the company to better optimize for helping customers through their entire shopping journey. You also develop and evangelize new mental models and new ways to measure the economic value of bleeding edge generative AI. As the senior economist in the team, you also guide the work and careers of other economists on the team.