The Role:
A Research Scientist at Amazon applies data science, subject matter expertise, and business acumen to deliver results at scale. As a Sustainability Science Researcher (Social Responsibility), you will be responsible for conducting assessments of social issues/impacts across Amazon, evaluating social sustainability impacts of value chains, from manufacturing, to transportation, to consumer. The ideal candidate will have industry experience researching key social issues/impacts/opportunities across the value chain. The candidate should be comfortable working with ambiguity, imperfect data, identifying sources of uncertainty, and finding public data or working with program teams to fill the gaps where needed. 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 have familiarity with key social issues that impact people across supply chains (e.g., labor and employment, migration, pay, worker voice, etc.). 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 social impacts/issues.
Key Responsibilities:
· Manage sustainability-related research projects through all stages: ideation, modeling, data collection, data analysis, data visualization, and reporting;
· Develop reports, dashboards and metrics which distill complex data into actionable insights;
· Subject matter expert in social/human rights impact assessments, materiality studies;
· 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; and
· Work closely with operations staff to optimize various business operations
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
· 5+ years conducting sustainability research and/or driving sustainability improvements within key areas of social responsibility (wages, pay, diversity, migration, labor);
· Experience with sustainability handprinting/footprinting, and/or similar labor/economics related research;
· Coding experience in Python, R, or similar.
· Master’s degree in economics, industrial engineering, or related fields.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
· Strong written and verbal communication skills;
· PhD in a highly quantitative or related field.
· Experience with Handprinting or Social LCA.
· Strong drive to question the status quo and learn new topics and skills.
· Experience with labor related data sets 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.
· Published a peer-reviewed study or report (e.g. thesis/dissertation, journal article, etc.)