Manager, Applied Science, Minerva

We are looking for an Applied Science Manager to build and lead Minerva's first Risk Science team in Bengaluru. This is a hands-on role: you will collaborate with scientists in the US to set the scientific bar and advance how we detect and respond to risk across KDP and Kindle Unlimited.

Key job responsibilities
- Hire, develop, and retain a high-performing team of applied scientists across levels, and set its practices for experimentation, evaluation, reviews, publishing, and patents.

- Push the quality of production risk models higher: set the standard for how model performance is measured, and lead the deep-dive science that turns model behavior into better detection.

- Develop new and improved detection models for fraud, abuse, copyright infringement, and harmful content, using NLP, computer vision, LLMs, and behavioral and graph-based modeling.

- Partner with engineering, product, policy, and investigation teams in the US and India to turn findings into fixes, and present options, risks, and tradeoffs to senior leaders.

- Work with the US science team to divide ownership clearly and share methods across Minerva.

About the team
Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has empowered a new wave of self-motivated creators, tearing down barriers that once blocked writers from reaching readers. Minerva is the science and analytics organization for Amazon's Books business. We build systems for content understanding, author marketing and discovery, fraud and abuse prevention, and content risk, and we optimize manufacturing, fulfillment, and quality for Print On Demand (POD). We have mature areas and green-field opportunities, with engineering, business intelligence, and data engineering support across our areas. We are now building science teams in Bengaluru that work closely with our scientists in the US. Risk Science, a team within Minerva, keeps fraud, abuse, copyright infringement, and harmful content out of the Books catalog and programs such as Kindle Unlimited, using text, image, and behavioral data.

Basic qualifications

• 3+ years of scientists or machine learning engineers management experience
• PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of building machine learning models or developing algorithms for business application experience
• Excellent communication skills, capable of discussing technical details with a variety of audiences and influencing decision-making processes.
• Experience writing, reviewing, and testing production code in Python or a related language
• Experience shipping machine learning, NLP, or computer vision models to production and maintaining their quality after launch

Preferred qualifications

• Experience leading teams in the areas of fraud detection, abuse prevention, and content risk management within a digital or e-commerce environment.
• Experience with model monitoring, data drift detection, calibration, or causal analysis of model behavior
• Experience with graph-based ML, behavioral modeling, or real-time detection
• Experience with LLMs, fine-tuning, embeddings, or multimodal models
• Experience building a new team, including hiring across several levels
• PhD in computer science, machine learning, statistics, or a related quantitative field, or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed venues (for example KDD, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, CVPR) or patents
• Experience leading teams that build with AI coding agents, with guardrails such as tests, automated review, and verifiable done criteria

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.