Dear UW leaders and partners,

I manage academic partnerships at Amazon including the new Amazon + UW Science Hub collaboration, led by Professor Josh Smith. As one of our strategic university partners, we wanted to ensure you had early awareness of a new initiative for PhD graduates. At the end of last week, Amazon launched The Amazon Postdoctoral Science(APS) program.

We appreciate your support circulating this unique opportunity with the appropriate faculty, administrators, and upcoming and recent graduates in the fields of Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Economics.

Overview of the newly-launched Amazon Postdoctoral Science program
This new program provides recent PhD graduates with a formal avenue to gain up to two years of industry experience and apply their domain knowledge as active contributors to Earth’s most Customer-centric company. The program advances Postdoctoral Scientists’ career development through industry exposure, publications, and science mentorship. Additionally, APS emphasizes engagement in the broader scientific research community through built-in weekly writing time, access to scientific peer-review roundtables, and annual financial support to present at academic conferences. Postdocs will also have the chance to interact with, and learn from, one another through cohort-based programming.

Definition of an Amazon Postdoctoral Scientist
Amazon is looking for hands-on, problem-solvers interested in leveraging their domain expertise to innovate and improve the customer experience while exploring new research areas. Amazon Postdoctoral Scientists are recent PhD graduates who earned their degree within two years of starting at Amazon. Postdoctoral Science roles are full-time, one-year commitments; postdocs cannot have a dual-affiliation during their time at Amazon. In their fulltime roles, Postdoctoral Scientists have the unique opportunity to work alongside and receive mentorship from scientists with backgrounds in both industry and academia.

Currently Available Postdoc Opportunities:
Amazon’s Postdoc offerings will change throughout the year based on business needs. Please visit Amazon’s job finder for the latest Postdoc opportunities and locations. Several currently open roles, include:

• Robotics AI: 3D scene understanding and robotics applications
• NLP: Several roles within the Alexa org, focused on reasoning, understanding, and fairness
• ML: Support ML teams design fairness and other Responsible AI virtues into their solutions from conception

Next Steps & Learn More
Join us for an information meeting on April 15th at 9AM PST/12 PM EST. Please register here. This meeting is for administrative and faculty leaders at our science hub institutions, not for prospective postdocs.

Interested Candidates: We invite interested candidates to apply now to join us in the inaugural cohort of postdocs at Amazon. For questions about applying to the program, please reach out to postdoc-interest@amazon.com.

Faculty with Postdoc Referrals: We welcome and encourage referrals directly from faculty for qualified candidates who received their PhD in the last two years. Please direct referrals to postdoc-interest@amazon.com.