Principal Sustainability Science Researcher

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Amazon’s Sustainability organization points Amazon’s innovative culture at environmental and social impacts with enormous scale. We consider the full lifecycle of our impact, from supply chain to customer experience, operational efficiency to waste diversion. We take action to improve the impact Amazon has on the environment, looking for wins that are good for our customers and our business as well. Sustainability Science and Innovation is a team of environmental and social research scientists and product managers answering core sustainability questions for the larger organization and working across the company to develop solutions to long term environmental and social hotspots.

The Role:
As a Principal Research Scientist at Amazon applies data science, subject matter expertise, and business acumen to deliver results at scale. As a Research Scientist, you will be responsible for conducting assessments of environmental and social issues across Amazon, evaluating the sustainability impacts of supply chains, from manufacturing, to transportation, to consumer use, to end-of-life. The ideal candidate will have industry experience conducting life cycle assessments (LCAs) of products and services, and detailed knowledge of manufacturing, design, development, and/or sourcing. This candidate will also possess excellent communication, negotiation and influencing skills to drive consensus across multiple stakeholders.

The successful candidate must have strong analytical skills and the ability to apply systems thinking to complex, fast moving problems. The candidate should be comfortable working with imperfect data, identifying sources of uncertainty, and finding public data to fill the gaps where needed. The candidate should have familiarity with LCA methods and applications. The successful candidate will work under the direction of senior business leaders, but will act as a Subject Matter Expert, leading research and building data analytics and models at scale. Amazon’s culture encourages innovation, and the candidate should be comfortable working in cold start scenarios in order to push the envelope on the hard to solve environmental and social issues.

Key Responsibilities:
· Manage sustainability-related research projects through all stages: ideation, modeling, data collection, data analysis, data visualization, and reporting;
· Develop tools and methods to harvest and continuously update data to provide sustainability insights at scale.
· Respond to time critical questions from multiple business teams;
· Professionally communicate to senior business leaders.
· Work closely with software engineering teams to drive real-time model implementations and new feature creations.
· Lead the early investigative / inception phase of strategic sustainability initiatives and effectively influence, negotiate, and communicate with stakeholders to enable hand off of those projects for implementation.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· Strong written and verbal communication skills;
· PhD in a highly quantitative or related field.
· Experience with LCA data sources and commercially available tools.
· Experience building scalable analytics, models, and applications.
· Experience with AWS features (S3, Redshift) is a plus.
· Ability to write well-structured, easily maintainable, and well-documented code and desire to improve by iterating on code through peer review.
· Experience working with big, messy datasets and deriving inferences from them.
· Broad experience applying data-driven decision making across multiple industries.
· Strong drive to question the status quo and learn new topics and skills.
· Published a peer-reviewed LCA study or report (e.g. thesis/dissertation, journal article, Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), etc.)
Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity Employer – Minority / Women / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age.

Desired profile

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· 5+ years conducting sustainability research and/or driving sustainability improvements;
· Experience with sustainability footprinting and/or Life Cycle Assessment (LCA);
· Coding experience in Python, R, or similar;
· Master’s degree in environmental science or engineering, industrial ecology, industrial or mechanical engineering, or related fields;
· Competence in statistical analysis, databases and mathematical modeling.